Quibi Sells Out $150M In Launch-Year Advertising Inventory

Dade Hayes

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Quibi, the short-form mobile streaming service launching next April, said it has sold out its $150 million in advertising inventory for its first year.

Advertisers getting in on the ground floor include Discover, General Mills, T-Mobile and Taco Bell, along with previously announced buyers Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, ABInBev, Walmart, Progressive and Google. Launch advertisers will have one year of category exclusivity.

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Quibi is led by CEO Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of Quibi parent WndrCo. It has raised $1 billion and will launch with two subscription tiers — $8 a month without ads and $5 a month with ads.

Ad units will be sold in six-, 10- or 15-second pre-roll increments that run immediately before Quibi programming. The company said it will also experiment with a number of other new ad formats.

In an appearance Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal‘s Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, CA, Whitman said the bespoke nature of Quibi (short for “quick bites”) makes it effective as an ad vehicle.

The ad experience on Quibi “is different” from that of traditional TV, she maintained, due to a mix of technology advances and the environment of mobile. Programming will be delivered in 10-minute “chapters” that Whitman compared to author Dan Brown’s 5-page chapters in his mega-selling The Da Vinci Code. In addition to pairing with such uniquely crafted content, she added, advertisers will be able to feel more secure than they do in broader, less controllable arenas like YouTube or Facebook.

“They can feel safe that their brand shows up next to content that they’re OK with,” she said.

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