At NewFronts And Upfronts, Keep An Eye On How Tech Is Dominating the Ad World

As the annual NewFronts begin today, to be followed by the traditional upfront week, the television advertising business is concerned about tariffs and the economy. It ought to be even more concerned about the way the technology giants are grabbing bigger and bigger shares of ad dollars.

In the traditional TV world, flat is the new up, especially in a post-election and Olympics year. A couple of weeks ago, Comcast announced that its first-quarter ad revenues at NBCUniversal were down 7%. It said that excluding the timing of sports content and political activity, advertising revenue was “relatively flat.”

Contrast that to what digital giants Alphabet, Amazon and Meta said about their first-quarter advertising revenues. All were seeing double-digit gains as they poured resources into providing marketers with better targeting and increased effectiveness.

On Amazon’s earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon Ads revenues were up 19% to $13.9 billion. He said expects that growth to continue because of a combination of traditional content and continually improving technology.

“Amazon Ads provides brands with tools to reach targeted audiences in our own entertainment properties such as Prime Video, Twitch and IMDB, in live sports such as NFL, NBA and NASCAR, audio content such as Amazon Music and Wondery and of course in our store as well as many other external sites such as Pinterest and BuzzFeed,” Jassy said. “All of our audience and measurement capabilities work for the ads we deliver across premium third party publishers through Amazon DSP and our secure clean rooms provide advertisers the ability to analyze data, produce core marketing metrics and understand how their marketing performs across various channels. We continue to see a lot of opportunity to further expand our full funnel capabilities for brands.”

Over at Alphabet, YouTube advertising revenues were up 10% to $8.9 billion, driven by direct response and brand campaigns. Search advertising was also up 10%.

“Focusing on our customers, we continue to solve advertisers' pain points and find opportunities to help them create, distribute, and measure more performant ads, infusing AI at every step of the marketing process.” said Philipp Schindler, senior VP and Chief Business Officer at Alphabet.

College basketball’s March Madness has long been a big ad platform for Paramount Global’s CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery’s cable networks, but YouTube is cashing in as well.

“During March Madness, brands aligned not only with clips and highlights from the games, but also with the creators who drive basketball culture, like Jesser and The Ringer's J. Kyle Mann,” Schindler said. “In Q1, the growth of our reservation based sds business more than doubled year-over-year.”

One example cited by Schindler was Toyota, which worked with Zach King, whose short videos have over 42 million followers, on a creator takeover. The takeover and accompanying creator ad lifted Toyota's brand awareness by 25% compared to Control Group and 9% compared to the Toyota brand ad,” he said.

At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg named improved advertising as one of the company’s major opportunities.

“Our goal is to make it so that any business can basically tell us what objective they're trying to achieve like selling something or getting a new customer and how much they're willing to pay for each result, and then we just do the rest,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta ad revenues were up 16% to $411.4 billion in Q1.

“AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their products than many businesses are themselves, and that keeps improving. And now AI is generating better creative options for many businesses as well,” he said. “This is really redefining what advertising is into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale. And if we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years, I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today. In just the last quarter, we are testing a new ads recommendation model for reels, which has already increased conversion rates by 5%, and we're seeing 30% more advertisers are using AI creative tools in the last quarter as well.”

The importance of tech to the ad business was also underscored by agency holding company Publicis, which has been buying ad-tech and data companies.

“With Epsilon and now Lotame, we have the best identity graph in the industry to help [clients] grow,” said CEO Arthur Sadoun on the company’s earnings call.

“Today, every client has realized the danger of relying on cookies or third parties data and the urgency to build direct relationships, not only with their existing customers, but also with prospects. We can uniquely help them to seize and directly engage with 91% of all adults on the Internet globally in a safe, secure and compliant way. We have built the industry's strongest and most Connected Media ecosystem from paid, earned, shared and owned media, driving efficiencies for our clients and optimizing their marketing spend, linking it directly to business outcomes.”

Digital’s share of total ad spending is expected to reach 62.7% in 2025, according to Dentsu, with social media, retail media and online video being the most important components. What the agency called “algorithmically supported” advertising expenditures are expected to gain a 79% share in the next three years.

Even in the more narrow U.S. video space, according to a recent IAB report, In 2024 ad spending on digital video surpassed linear TV for the first time. In 2025, digital video is expected to have nearly a 60% share of spending.

So this week as you listen to the NewFront presentations and the earnings call at Disney (which has spent billions to be a streaming leader and boost its ad tech) and next week at the upfronts, remind people who still think they’re in show business that in the ad world, it’s tech and data that’s bringing in the dough.

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Research and analytics firm MarketCast said it named Amy Fenton and Paul Forgue as co-presidents.

Amy Fenton and Paul Forgue (Photos courtesy of MarketCast)

Fenton and Forgue are expected to replace current CEO John Batter in running the company.

Fenton has been chief analytics and operations officer at MarketCast since 2022. Forgue joined MarketCast as CFO in 2024.

"Amy and Paul bring the ideal mix of technology and advertising expertise, financial acumen, and leadership to guide MarketCast's next chapter," said Ahmed Wahla, Partner with Kohlberg, MarketCast's lead financial investor. "Together, they'll accelerate our technology roadmap, delivering data-driven solutions that help our clients thrive and win in a rapidly evolving, and often complicated media landscape."

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Ampersand said it named Todd Braverman as chief revenue officer.

Todd Braverman (photo courtesy of Ampersand)

Braverman had previously been with Nexstar as executive VP, head of national sales. Before that he was senior VP, agency sales at Warner Bros. Discovery.

At Ampersand, Braverman will be responsible for leading Ampersand’s revenue strategy and play a central role in evolving Ampersand’s go-to-market strategy, aligning product innovation and delivering on client needs, the company said.

“We are thrilled to welcome Todd to Ampersand at such a pivotal moment in our company’s growth,” said Mike Dean, president of Ampersand. “His track record of building high-performing sales organizations and delivering results across a rapidly evolving TV landscape makes him the ideal leader to help us chart our next chapter.”