• by Joe Mandese , 86 minutes ago

Over the years, the annual upfront media-buying season has sometimes been likened to lemming-like “herd mentality” behavior, but Carat Chief Investment Officer Carrie Braverman Drinkwater used that metaphor in a completely different context during MediaPost’s “Upfront 2026-27” Outfront Forum panel to illustrate why the major TV networks may be less in command of driving the market than ever before.

She closed the panel by sharing a personal anecdote about what happened when she and other multi-generational members of her family played a popular board game called “Herd Mentality” in which players pick cards with questions on them and predict how the rest of the herd will guess.

“One of the questions was, 'What’s your favorite network?'," and it was like ‘What, what do you mean “a network?”’, Drinkwater recalled, adding: “Even the grandparents were, 'Well, can you explain?' It was wild."

Drinkwater used to the anecdote to remind Outfront attendees that it’s not just industry media buyers who are changing how they view the television marketplace, but most consumers too.

Aside from “network” pronoun recall, the panel unlocked other insights about how the upfront marketplace is changing – and in some ways, how it is not.

One of the most important ones for me was how the panel answered a question I’ve asked Outfront panelists for years: Do they plan to register their budgets with the networks the same way they have since I began covering the marketplace in the early 1980s.

After decades of saying yes, this year’s panel indicated a change in the status quo. While two of the panelists didn’t answer my question at all, two of them indicated they would likely share some budget information with the networks in advance of their negotiations, but not in the way they have in the past.

“Let’s just say we’ll have conversations,” said Canvas Worldwide Chief Investment Officer Ed Gentner, adding: “It’s not like always in the past, 'On May 15th, here’s the spreadsheet with our budgets.’”

"It’s not, 'Here’s how much by client'," added Carat’s Drinkwater, noting: “It’s not a traditional registration. It’s 'an intent-to-spend'."

One way the upfront marketplace hast not changed -- at least not completely -- is the integral role Nielsen’s audience ratings estimates will play.

“The large majority of the business is still transacting with a lot of the bigger media companies based on Nielsen,” Canvas’ Gentner said, adding, “That’s why it’s such a big deal right now.”

By “big deal,” Gentner was referring to some obligatory Nielsen data snafus that have created confusion, uncertainty and a delay in releasing accurate audience-planning data so advertisers and agencies can estimate their upfront advertising deals heading into upfront negotiations.

“They’ve been disappointing this year,” Gentner said, adding that one of the reasons Nielsen continued to serve as the primary advertising currency heading into this upfront was the long-term stability of its audience data.

“The stability isn’t there,” Gentner noted, adding: “the goalposts keep moving.”

That said, all of the panelists concurred that as important as Nielsen’s "currency" data is for negotiating deals, agencies -- and especially their clients -- have moved away from audience impressions data and much more toward outcomes-based measures, ROI and ROAS (return on ad spending) analyses and rely much more heavily on their own proprietary modeling in terms of the actual reach and frequency their upfront buys will deliver.