YouTube Sets 2024 Upfront Date, Locks in Three-Year Deal for Brandcast at Lincoln Center

Todd Spangler
·2 min read
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Marketers, mark you calendar: Google is bringing YouTube’s Brandcast back to New York City during TV’s upfront ad-sales season for 2024 for a third year running.

Next year’s YouTube Brandcast will be held Wednesday, May 15, 2024, starting at 6 p.m. at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. It’s the second year the platform’s sales event will be at the venue, and the company announced that it has inked a three-year partnership to hold Brandcast at David Geffen Hall through 2026. (In 2022, YouTube Brandcast was at the Imperial Theatre in New York’s Times Square.)

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YouTube is expected to bring out top execs, including CEO Neal Mohan, along with a series of top creator partners to make the case to Madison Avenue that they should spend more of their ad dollars on the internet platform. More than 150 million people in the U.S. per month watch YouTube on connected TVs, according to Google, and September 2023 marked the eighth consecutive month that YouTube was the No. 1 most-watched service or network on TV screens, according to Nielsen.

It’s safe to say YouTube will also tout NFL Sunday Ticket, its exclusive out-of-market games package that debuted on the platform with the 2023 season, as a premium advertising opportunity. And it likely also will feature YouTube Shorts, the TikTok-style short-form video feature that in three years since launching has boomed to more than 70 billion daily views.

“YouTube remains the best opportunity for brands to stay relevant and connect with viewers and creators alike, driving engagement in the place where the world comes to watch,” Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle, VP of YouTube ads marketing, wrote in a blog post Monday.

For the third quarter of 2023, YouTube ad sales rebounded, increasing 12.5% year over year to $7.95 billion. The stronger-than-expected results, which execs said came from both brand and direct-response advertising, come after YouTube fell short of expectations in the year-ago period, when ad revenue fell 1.9%.

Pictured above: Sean Downey, president of ad sales for Google, speaking at YouTube Brandcast 2023 at David Geffen Hall in New York City on May 17, 2023

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