For BravoCon, the company will bring in a larger slate of partners with new and returning brands across all categories including jewelry, pet care and home furnishings, among others. Meanwhile, sales are nearly double the pace for the Olympics in Paris when compared to the Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 at the one-year benchmark, with more than $100M of new Olympic advertisers who were not in Tokyo.
For SNL’s 50th, NBCU is looking at a full 7-month promotional window and has received partnership requests across several categories, including auto, wireless, tech, beverage, insurance, retail, CPG, financial and travel.
An eventful upfront
NBCU’s upfront news comes despite a rollercoaster year for the company, with former CEO Jeff Shell being ousted by Comcast in April and former ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino exiting for the Twitter CEO position days before the company’s upfront week kickoff presentation.
However, following the company’s upfront week kickoff in May, Mark Marshall, named interim chairman of NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships group, assured Adweek that negotiations were business as usual for the company and Yaccarino’s exit wouldn’t affect talks.
“I don’t think it changes anything on that side of things. Obviously, I worked with Linda for 10 years. We were aligned in terms of getting the value for our content and our properties. So I don’t think it really changes a whole lot on that side of what we’re doing,” Marshall said.
Marshall also noted that the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike wouldn’t have a drastic effect on negotiations either.
“We feel really great about the schedule that we have all the way through the end of this year, so hopefully, this comes to a resolution in short order. But we feel really good about it,” Marshall said. “This was not a surprise. We had been game-planning for the past year on that. So we feel great about the content that we have already shot.”
Striking a balance for the fall
Though Marshall said the strike didn’t affect negotiations, NBC recently joined CBS, Fox and The CW in changing its fall lineup amid the ongoing strike, with previously announced series such as Night Court not receiving fall premieres.
“We have a lot of unscripted because we do have The Voice, and we have Saturday night football and Sunday Night Football, so that is a nice security blanket to have. But the truth is the business has changed so much in the last few years, and we are really on a year-round development cycle and production cycle,” Jeff Bader, president of entertainment program planning strategy for NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, told Adweek in May. “So we’re in the fortunate position that many of the shows that we’ve announced for the fall, we will have them even if there’s a prolonged strike.”
