Streamers Put Commercials in Movies, Top Series Where Ads Were Once Forbidden

Brian Steinberg
·4 min read
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The television industry’s annual “upfront” is usually a place where advertisers get to preview new series and specials, not blockbuster movies, so NBC raised eyebrows Monday when one of the first previews it showed to an audience at Radio City Music Hall was of the coming Universal film “Wicked.”

NBCUniversal, chief content officer Donna Langley told the crowd, was  “excited to build up our story legacy across film, TV and streaming.”

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Movies and premium cable series from HBO and Showtime used to be something traditional TV advertisers got their hands on only after they had made their way through theaters and pay-TV windows. Now, as a batch of this year’s upfront showcases reveal, they are increasingly being dangled before Madison Avenue as a major reason to support TV companies.

Warner Bros. Discovery is expected to make a similar point at its upfront Wednesday morning, when executives talk to advertisers about all the Warner Bros. films and HBO series that will be able to accept their commercials in just a few months’ time. Jon Steinlauf, the company’s chief U.S. advertising sales officer, plans to talk up Warner Bros .movies and DC films and the new seasons of “House of The Dragon,” “White Lotus” and “The Last of Us.” And Dana Nussbaum, the executive vice president of worldwide marketing for the Warner Bros. studio who had a strong hand in marketing the recent “Barbie” movie, will tell tell attendees how the company is breaking down internal silos in the goal of calling attention to its properties.

“These are all pop-culture tentpole moments and we are able to get advertisers involved,” says Steinlauf. In the past, he adds, media companies “only talked about the primetime broadcast schedule and pilots, and now that has changed completely.”

Part of the appeal of first-run movies and original premium cable series was that they ran without commercials. In the age of streaming, that may no longer be entirely possible.

Now that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have launched ad-supported tiers, their top movies and series can take commercials. A recent streaming of Amazon’s reboot of “Road House,” for example, came with a pre-roll ad for the movie “Civil War” that also told the streamer that “Road House” would appear without more ads thanks to the viewing of the spot. By incorporating ads, the two streaming giants are putting pressure on more traditional media companies to attach commercials to properties that never had to include them.

With nearly every major streaming service offering an ad-supported tier to help bring new subscriptions to offset billions of dollars invested in content, advertisers can get their hands on video properties that were typically never available. Warner Bros. Discovery recently struck deals that made Uber Eats a sponsor of the last season of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” when it streamed on the ad-supported tier of Max. Mercedes sponsored the final streamed season of “Succession,” and General Motors’ GMC was a supporter of the recently aired “True Detective: Night Country.”

Such stuff “has become much more of a focus point of the upfront markets,” says Steinlauf.

Indeed, this week every major upfront presenter has tried to woo ad dollars with the prospect of putting ads alongside premium streaming favorites like “The Bear” and “Only Murders in the Building” on Hulu or new Marvel TV series on Disney+. Amazon trotted out A-list actors like Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell — the type who never in the past had to ask Madison Avenue for support. Fox’s Tubi, meanwhile, has long been ad-supported, and shows a bevy of regular TV programs as well as some movies created expressly for the service.

Such activity may have been spurred in part by the coronavirus pandemic. That’s when Disney, NBCU and others experimented with sending top movies straight to streaming and got consumers more comfortable with watching new films on a giant TV screen rather than one in a movie theater. TV viewers are accustomed to seeing commercials on them, while moviegoers only expect ads in the time when they are trying to find their seat before the film starts.

In years to come, movie-watching and TV-viewing are likely to blur further. Streaming services, still in nascent relationships with Madison Avenue, will crave more of its millions. Even the main appeal of streaming — the fact that it relies on significantly fewer ads than traditional TV — could eventually become a thing of the past.

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