Ah predictions. Some do it well, and some not so much. 

We try to predict everything from sporting events to rock, paper, scissor (always predict that wrong, darn you rock!)

In the advertising world, we predict how much money will enter the marketplace in a given year. Although, it’s less of a prediction and more of a “let’s ask all of these executives about what they are going to do and we can tabulate and analyze that data and ‘predict’ what will happen.” As the digital world has evolved over the past 25ish years, dollars have increased each year, and this year won’t disappoint.

It looks like we are going to see a lot of dollars flowing into the marketplace for the newfront, with many brands promising to outspend what they spent in 2022.

But you may ask, where are these dollars going? The simple answer is Hulu, and Hulu only. But the wealth will be spread out amongst the top streamers in the land.

That’s a lot of percentage for the big 4. Hulu remains under the Disney umbrella (for now) and YouTubeTV is starting to increase their subscription rates. Peacock is enjoying a nice split of viewers with fewer folks watching programming on either linear or streaming. Roku wants the NewFronts to have a NewStrategy.

So where does this leave us? It does put us in a place where the NewFront might start resembling the UpFront, where we are going to HAVE to increase our dollars in the spring so we have inventory in the fall, especially when we are thinking about the live TV events within the streaming platforms.

Now we know the digital world is a little more flexible than that of TV, but inventory still isn’t infinite. We have to predict what will bring us the best value and biggest audience. Predict the right programming, clients are happy (rock beats scissor). Predict the wrong, and you might be looking for a new client (stop putting rock down for EVERYTHING!).

Photo: 123RF/iinspiration