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Mark Marshall on NBCU’s Post-Linda Yaccarino Upfront Event

Published

2 years ago

May 18, 2023

Max

Mark Marshall on NBCU's Post-Linda Yaccarino Upfront Event

And obviously, Linda departed for Twitter days before the show. Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, led things, and then you closed it out. And you both acknowledged Linda onstage. How did you reconfigure the presentation after her exit?
Yeah, there was some rewriting. I was always in the presentation, so my section moved to the end. We rewrote a little bit of it. And then, obviously, Mark Lazarus stepping in at the front. That was written between Friday and Monday.

Wow, so fast.
Yeah, but the rest of the show was pretty set.

Mark addressed the WGA strike during the presentation, but how much of the event was impacted by the strike? And how did you decide to lean into news talent more?
Mark said it best from the stage. We hope that a great resolution happens on the strike on both sides. But, leaning in, we’ve typically had news show up within our presentations before as well as sports and other areas. So having them play a bigger part. They were already going to be in there. They just played a larger role than we had previously.

Some publishers chose to go without talent in the upfront. Why was it important to include the news team and have that talent on the stage?
I think there is the element of having that quality as the most watched news organization that we have, and people are familiar with them. These are the faces they wake up with in the morning, or you have Lester Holt in the evening. So it was a way to provide some of that star quality of people that they know in that environment, and I think they did a great job.

Obviously, I worked with Linda for 10 years. We were aligned in terms of getting the value for our content and our properties. So I don’t think it really changes a whole lot.
Mark Marshall, on how Linda Yaccarino’s exit will affect upfront negotations

What were the priorities you wanted to get across in this event?
We’ve spent so much time over the past year talking about data and measurement, and while those are extremely important, we sometimes lose focus that all of those things are layered on top of content. And content is really what engages the consumer and turns the consumer from a viewer into a customer for a brand. So I think we wanted to make sure that we got the story out and were able to show that content as the star of the show.

And you did it all as a live event. But with Netflix switching to virtual amid the writers strike, was that ever a conversation to go virtual?
It was never a conversation, and, actually, over the past couple of weeks, I’d gotten so many notes from clients and agencies saying, “Please do not cancel,” or, “Please don’t do virtual because one of the highlights of our year is the upfront at Radio City for NBC.” So it was a nice confirmation of the importance of this and a nice gathering for the industry.