This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What can you tell us about early Super Bowl negotiations?
I’m not going to share much, other than to say we have a lot of demand, and there are some businesses done already, but we are, as you can imagine, in active conversations. I’m sure it’s no surprise. When you have the Super Bowl, there are a lot of people who want to have conversations with you early. So we’re having those conversations with brands and with our agency partners to make sure we get to a good place with everybody who wants to be part of the show.
Along with the Super Bowl, what are the priorities you have heading into the upfront?
This year, we are going to have four of the biggest moments across the entertainment and sports space, that usually sit across four different companies. We have the College Football Championship, which we’ve always had. This year, we will have the Grammys, they’re coming to ABC. We will then have the Super Bowl, and a couple weeks later, we will have the Oscars. So in a matter of six weeks, we will have four of the largest live culturally defining moments on television across our Disney platform.
That’s everything from ESPN, ABC, Disney+, Hulu, all of our platforms. And so those are big moments for brands to come and be part of driving culture conversation in entertainment and music, but also in sports.
It’s a lot of live opportunities, which are something brands are clamoring for amid increasing fragmentation.
Live content and storytelling across our platforms is a driver of culture and conversation, and we have so much of that across so many of our shows. When you think across our entertainment lineup historically, not only award shows but also when you think of things like American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, etc. And then you have all of that across sports, not only football.
The reality is, just because we now have the NFL Network and RedZone for linear, plus all of our college football and our NFL, 40% of the football impressions that are going to be in market next year are at the Walt Disney Company.
Wow. Yeah, 40% of football impressions is huge.
That’s a really powerful message that we want to make sure brands understand and can take advantage of in a way that is different and exciting. There are new properties with the NFL Network and everything that the NFL Network will be as part of our ESPN platform. You can imagine the extent to which that will actually only get better, and the opportunity to do things with RedZone. Last year, brands were all over it. I was talking to the team yesterday. They were like, “Oh my God, we have a waitlist of people who want to be part of that.”
Where do you see the biggest area of advertiser growth this upfront season?
