There was a particularly illuminating conversation I overheard during this year’s upfronts.

As a gaggle of attendees waited to get into Paramount’s Carnegie Hall presentation, a small group worried whether they would make it through the security line in time to catch the beginning of ad sales chief Jo Ann Ross’s pitch to media buyers.

After a beat, one laughed and said, “Well, it’s not like it’s going to change anything for us.”

It’s a little-spoken truism that nonetheless hangs over upfronts week. Each year, ad buyers spend a week in May shuffling into New York City event spaces to watch network presentations chock-full of show trailers and musical performances (Stevie Wonder at the CW, anyone?) And while they’re fun, flashy, and nice for networking, these dog-and-pony shows rarely change ad buyers’ minds.

• “I don’t want to discount the fact that they are really amazing presentations—there’s a lot of work that goes into those presentations and they’re a big show,” hedged Maureen Bosetti, chief partnerships officer at the agency Initiative. But unless something seems “dramatically off” in a presentation, buying plans are usually set before stepping foot into any ballroom or venue.
• “There’s so much planning that’s happening prior to those presentations that by the time you get to those presentations, there really shouldn’t be a huge surprise,” Bosetti said.

Other media buyers agree: By the end of April, Kelly Metz, Omnicom’s managing director of advanced TV activation, already knew what she needed to know about the networks’ upcoming plans, upfront presentations entirely unseen.

“This, in my mind, is planned and done,” Metz told Marketing Brew at the time. “I’m now thinking about scatter, programmatic, how we move into ‘23, ‘24.”

Then and now

Decades ago, upfront presentations were informative sessions that highlighted what programs were for sale in the fall. Network sellers announced fall prime-time schedules and often dedicated a portion of their presentations to the most important titles in their portfolio, even screening full pilots of shows like ABC’s Modern Family.

But times have changed. Keep reading here.—KS

“Social is not a career. It’s a job along the way, but it’s not going to lead you to the C-suite,” Dan Gingiss, who has led social teams at McDonald’s, Discover, and more, said in 2019.

And yet, only a few years later…there are CMOs who started out in social media, working at brands, startups, vendors, and other companies. Some individuals who’ve landed lead marketing roles say they garnered a diverse set of skills relevant to the CMO role while working in social media.

• Take Lia Haberman, for example. She’s the CMO of Fit Body App, but got her start in journalism before moving into a social media role at Yahoo.
• “There’s a perception that being a social media manager is really just a basic job,” Haberman continued, citing the old “even an intern could do it” joke.
• But the perception of what a social media manager does and what they actually do on a day-to-day basis—creating content, representing the company and/or product, crafting strategy and understanding analytics—are still very different, she explained.

Big picture: Dave Frankland, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence who recently spearheaded a report on the evolving role of the CMO, told us that it’s not common to see social media professionals as CMOs yet, simply because the discipline has not been around that long in comparison to other aspects of marketing.

However, he told us that they might be better suited to becoming the CMOs of the future than any other type of marketer due to the way the CMO role’s responsibilities have evolved over the years.

These days, the CMO job is less about big brand campaigns and more about driving revenue, managing tech, grappling with data privacy, and representing the customer. When you start to look at some of those newer responsibilities, it “doesn’t seem that difficult to make the argument for why a good social media manager could translate into being a good CMO,” he told us.

Read the full story here.—PB

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• Director - Channel Marketing at Validity
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1. Heineken devises bottle opener that shuts down work apps
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3. Miller High Life is turning beer lovers into wedding officiants
4. Oscar Mayer is retiring the Wienermobile for good

Keep scrolling for the answer.