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There are a lot of questions in this year’s upfront market negotiations: Will ad prices come down after last year? How will TV networks and streaming platforms price sports inventory? How will Amazon and Netflix play into the allocation of upfront dollars?
Here’s two more: How many marketers are actually planning on spending in this year’s upfront marketplace? And how will that spending compare with last year?
According to a Digiday+ Research survey of nearly 80 marketer professionals conducted in the second quarter, significantly fewer marketers have plans to spend in the upfront market this year, and of those who do have upfront dollars to spend, fewer will spend more this year than they did last year.
Digiday’s survey found that more than a third of marketer pros will spend in this year’s upfront marketplace: 36% of marketers said they have plans for upfront spending in 2025. That percentage is certainly not insignificant, but it represents a big drop from the percentage of marketers who said last year they had upfront spending plans. In 2024, 51% of marketer pros told Digiday they would spend in the upfront marketplace.
It’s important to note here that the 51% who planned upfront spending last year represented an upward trend. In 2022, 29% of marketers said they would spend in the upfront marketplace that year, 37% said the same in 2023, and then 51% said the same in 2024. This makes the drop to 36% this year feel significant.
Digiday’s survey found that, among the marketers who do plan on spending in the 2025 upfront market, fewer expect to spend more this year compared with last year. Fewer than a quarter of marketer pros (22%) told Digiday this year that they plan to spend more this year than they did in last year’s upfront market. Last year, just under half of marketers (48%) said the same — marking another significant drop.
At the same time, Digiday’s survey found that the percentage of marketers who said they’ll spend less this year than they did last year has increased. Nearly a third of marketer pros (32%) said they’ll spend less in this year’s upfront marketplace than they did last year, compared with just 18% who said the same a year ago.
There is a note of continuity in this year’s upfront market, though. Digiday’s survey found that marketers are allocating their upfront spend similarly to how they did so last year. Fifty-seven percent of marketer pros said this year that they plan to spend more on streaming platforms than on networks, on par with the 58% who said the same last year.
Interestingly though, the percentage of marketers who said they would spend more on networks than on streaming platforms is up this year compared with last year. In 2024, 14% of marketers said they would put more upfront spend toward networks than streaming platforms. This year, that percentage is 21%.
And the percentage of marketers who said they would evenly distribute their upfront spend between streamers and networks dropped a bit this year. In 2024, 27% of marketers said they planned to spend about the same on streaming platforms and networks in the upfront marketplace, compared with 21% who said the same in 2025.
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