Donna Speciale has long been one of the advertising industry’s most powerful executives, but over the years, there have been some things even she couldn’t do.
Nearly two decades ago, Speciale, then a senior media buyer at MediaVest who negotiated prices and terms for commercial time, approached TV networks with an intriguing idea: Why couldn’t her company buy up an entire ad break, then “program” it with spots from clients in a way that would keep people from tuning away or getting up for a snack? Maybe the movie trailer runs before the ad for floor cleaner, so the thinking went. Viewers would stick around — and, presumably, ratings would improve.
TV networks had good reasons to win her favor. At the time, Speciale’s client roster included Procter & Gamble and Walmart, among other big spenders. Even so, no one would let her test the experiment. The networks wanted to retain control of their chief product: what people see on TV.
Suddenly, they’re willing to loosen their grip. During NBC’s telecast of the Paris Olympics last year, GroupM, a different media buyer, was granted permission to buy up an entire commercial break and fill it with ads only from its own clients, including Google, Target and Coca-Cola. It no doubt helped that one of the companies involved was NBCU’s own Universal Pictures.
“Way back when we were trying to do this, nobody had to do it,” says Speciale, who is now president of U.S. advertising sales and marketing at Spanish-language giant TelevisaUnivision. In the streaming era, “times have changed,” she adds. “Everybody now is looking at trying to turn the model upside down. And I think everything is on the table.”
Never have so many media entities decided to smash longstanding policies about where commercials might run. Both CNN and ABC last year opted to sell ads during their telecasts of the 2024 presidential debates, which for years have aired commercial free, as a public service. Netflix, which for years vowed never to run ads in its streaming hits, in 2022 did an about-face and now allows marketers in to live sports telecasts as well as scripted favorites on its reduced-price subscription tier. Amazon Prime Video has become extremely aggressive in its bid to vacuum up TV ad dollars, and has done the same. HBO programs, long associated with running commercial free, can now be broken up with ads on Max, the streaming outlet backed by corporate parent Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount Global, struck deals last year that let Ram Trucks and Duluth Trading Co., among others, create “Yellowstone”-themed commercials that popped up in the ad breaks inside the show.
Even “Saturday Night Live,” famously resistant to commercials using elements from its sketches, is getting in on the act. During its 50th anniversary season, the show’s producers and cast have worked with Capital One, Allstate and Volkswagen, letting them make use of popular characters.
Why are media giants letting their walls fall when in the past they wouldn’t crumble? “The rise of streaming has made them a lot more flexible to do any deal,” says Brian Sheehan, a professor of advertising at Syracuse University. “And now that streaming services are accepting ads, they are open for any business deal they can do.”
In a climate when viewers have more ability to ignore commercials, advertisers “need to show up in different ways,” says Michelle Deignan, vice president of Mondelez’ Oreo, during an interview. “So much of advertising is wallpaper. Our job is to break through that.”
The media companies aren’t just opening their gates to terrain once deemed off limits. They are also agreeing to complex commercial-break stunts that are difficult to construct.
Disney early last year sold PepsiCo one-third of a single day’s commercial inventory on ABC, so that the company’s Frito-Lay snacking giant could run eight different ads repeatedly to tell a story starring actor Stephen Tobolowsky. The commercials appeared during “Good Morning America,”’ “GMA3,” “General Hospital,” “Shark Tank,” “20/20” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and marked the first time ABC had struck a day-long sponsorship of that sort with a single advertiser.
“Where advertising is going right now is a lot of people are breaking rules, and what we are always about is that everything works until it doesn’t,” says Chris Bellinger, chief creative officer at PepsiCo’s food operations, which includes Frito-Lay.
More commercials may emerge in places where they have not been expected or welcome. Disney recently told subscribers of Hulu, ESPN+ and Disney+ that as of March 24, “as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our ‘no ads’ or ‘ad free’ subscription tiers.” Such conditions have been disclosed to subscribers in the past, according to a person familiar with the matter, and usually come about when viewers watch live events or sports — feeds that are the same as what people see on a linear broadcast.
Even the Super Bowl isn’t immune. Fox Sports helped facilitate at least three different Big Game efforts this year, including allowing the use of announcers Tom Brady and Kevin Burkhardt for a battery commercial from Berkshire Hathaway’s Duracell. Sportscasters Julian Edelman and Charissa Thompson were given permission to appear in Super Bowl teasers for Georgia-Pacific’s Angel Soft. And Fox Sports worked to give Rocket Cos. fifteen seconds of live footage from Caesars Superdome in a bid to create a live-crowd sing-along tied to commercial the company ran in the event. Originally, Fox was dismissive of the potential for the stunt, and its executives were correct in their assumptions. The crowd appeared to ignore efforts to get people to sing the John Denver hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
In the past, such stuff was rare, not commonplace. That’s why Procter & Gamble attracted so much attention in 2017 when Fox allowed announcer Terry Bradshaw to be seen on camera with a noticeable stain on his shirt. Within seconds, he was off on a chase to clean his clothes, part of a Super Bowl commercial for Tide laundry detergent. The hand-off from live action to Madison Avenue message was unique. Now, says Mark Evans, executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports, “you are seeing more of it.”
Putting too much emphasis on such packages can be risky. If media outlets put all their premium concepts up for sale, what will they be able to offer in the future? Now that advertisers have a taste for once-forbidden fruit, will they push for even more to be made available? And how sustainable is a business that hangs more often on “one off” bonuses such as commercial-free hours in the Olympics and other difficult-to-obtain elements?
“You can’t sell all of your inventory to the same brand every single day,” says Ryan Gould, recently named a president of U.S. advertising sales at Warner Bros. Discovery. Some of the most eye-popping packages hitting the market in recent months may not be repeatable, he says, and they may create a viewing experience that audiences don’t appreciate. Warner Bros. Discovery has similar conversations with advertisers and their representatives, he says, and they often make bold requests. “Sometimes, brands ask us to do things that we don’t think is in the best interests of the user experience or the long-term viability of our partnership,” Gould says. “Those conversations aren’t always the easiest to have.”
And yet, there may be more of them. “Today’s media world is so different,” says Bridget Sponsky, executive director of brand and sponsorship marketing at financial-services company Ally Financial, which has spent the past several years aligning itself with women’s sports. “You can’t just run traditional messages, interrupting people’s viewing. You need to dovetail with the reason why they are there,” and show how sponsorship dollars help make the viewing experience better.
In an era when ad dollars are less reliable, pushing back on a big sponsor may be more difficult. Simply put, more of Madison Avenue’s money is going to streaming outlets. In the media industry’s most recent “upfront” market, when the bulk of all commercials tied to video are sold, ad commitments to streaming video hubs rose a noticeable 35.3%, hiking to $11.1 billion, according to consultancy Media Dynamics Inc., compared with $8.2 billion 2023. The amount committed to streaming video for the next TV season was greater than that devoted to primetime broadcast ($9.34 billion) or primetime cable ($9.065 billion) — a first for the industry.
Still, advertisers can only do so much in the streaming environment. Even subscribers to ad-supported tiers are driven there in part by the fact that commercial loads are smaller when compared to what is seen on traditional TV. One of the biggest concerns in streaming is a tendency by media companies to serve the same ad over and over to a single subscriber — a bid to deliver guarantees of impressions in a venue where people often watch programs at moments of their own choosing, not in giant crowds. “The uptick in streaming viewership is driving demand” by advertisers to make better use of the content they’re supporting, says Dario Spina, chief marketing officer of Paramount Global’s in-house unit that works with advertisers. With that dynamic growing more pronounced, he says, advertisers are showing significantly more interest in big “tentpole” properties and live events.
In the past, advertisers ran the same commercial everywhere, a technique known as “spray and pray.” The hope was that multiple exposures to a massive audience would spur viewers to make a purchase. Advertisers now want to forge special ties to specific programs, says Rita Ferro, president of Disney’s ad-sales operations, “to make sure if they’re spending the money on the advertising, that it’s going to really resonate and drive an outcome.”
“I don’t know of a single advertising partner that doesn’t start a conversation with ‘I want to do something that’s never been done before,’” says Ferro.
