NBCUniversal’s upfront event was all about family—and not just because of the Fast and Furious spinoffs.
In addition to Vin Diesel taking the stage to announce new shows from the Fast franchise coming to Peacock, NBCU’s event at Radio City on May 11 featured an extended family of brands, including everything from scripted entertainment and Sunday night sports offerings to Bravo, as well as a spotlight on Versant, despite NBCU previously spinning off several of its cable channels to form the company.
NBCU also touted a 100th anniversary special, bringing all of its properties and history, as well as advertisers, together for a three-hour event.
Mark Marshall, NBCU’s ad sales chief, caught up with ADWEEK shortly after the presentation to talk about everything from the Fast surprises to the company kicking off the event with several AI-driven adtech updates. Plus, despite ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel coming under fire (again) from the Trump administration and the FCC, and Stephen Colbert’s Late Show bowing out later this month, Marshall said brands are still clamoring for late night TV.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ADWEEK: Mark, you basically just came off stage. How are you feeling?
Marshall: It was exciting. Last year, we were so focused on Legendary February. This got us back to our roots. With one singular buy, you can buy entertainment, news, sports in English or Spanish, broadcast, cable, and streaming.
You also had some updates to the event, including a live Bravo talk show as people walked into Radio City.
We want to continue to evolve and make it not the same thing. We had our live Bravo show from the lobby. There was a little nod to the upcoming Bravo Fest and BravoCon. These people are not only clients but also fans of the brands we have. So it was fun to evolve with that this year.
What were the priorities heading into the event?
We were lucky to have the theme of You Only Turn 100 One Time, so we were able to use that as a unifying force across everything we had. It just so happens that you had 100 years of NBC, 75 years of Today, and 20 years of The Real Housewives. So it was a big celebratory year. You come back to this idea of these big live events, plus the everyday moments, and we finally have the research to prove how these two things work together. This year was a little bit more content, plus the adtech element.
You started with a lot of adtech, including introducing the Performance Insights Hub to give advertisers data across linear and streaming. I think that’s the first time I saw adtech lead an event in so much detail.
