There is no such thing as a new idea. At least, that seems to be the case in the TV industry.

“Remember when streamers told you, ‘We’re going to do television a new way, so I’m afraid we won’t be needing your little commercials anymore?” Seth Meyers said during NBCU’s annual upfront presentation on Monday. “Cut to a few years later, every episode of Shōgun is interrupted by, ‘Whopper, Whopper, Double Whopper.’”

Ad-supported tiers, which are now commonplace on just about every major streaming service on the market, are just the beginning. This upfronts season highlighted the extent to which streamers are embracing some of the most tried-and-true business strategies of old-fashioned TV, whether that’s finding ways to squeeze more ads into TV shows, embracing the most reliable types of programming, or even returning to the kinds of service bundles that were once the norm in the old days of linear.

In other words, what’s old in the TV business is very much new again.

Continue reading here.—KS, JS

The disconnect between marketing and sales is a tale as old as time. Their correlation has been left to educated guesses and media mix modeling models, with marketers often left in the dark to make wishy-washy decisions based on delayed or less-than-clear data.

But what if there was a way to track every dollar from input to impact?

Let Omnicom and Flywheel show you how. As a well-established, hyper-accurate predictor of sales, Flywheel’s next-level e-commerce solutions now live within Omnicom, the world’s most strategically creative marketing company. Yeah, you can probably see where this is going.

By coming together, they can tell you whether your marketing is resulting in sales or not. No more guessing or hoping. Just measuring and maximizing.

Marketing, meet sales.

Netflix with Ads keeps getting bigger.

The streaming giant’s ad-supported tier has 40 million global monthly active users, up considerably from the 5 million monthly active ad-supported users one year ago, the company announced this week ahead of its second-ever upfront presentation to advertisers in New York. Of all Netflix sign-ups in countries that have an ad-supported plan, more than 40% are for the ad tier, the company said, and nearly two-thirds of ad-supported viewers are watching programming for more than 10 hours every month.

As part of its pitch to advertisers, Netflix, which last reported nearly 270 million total subscribers worldwide in April, touted the continued growth of its ad tier and emphasized its focus on live sports and gaming.

To continue supporting its ad-tier growth, Netflix, which announced a partnership with Microsoft last year on its ad tier, is also building out its ad tools. That now includes a new in-house ad-tech platform, the company announced.

“Bringing our ad tech in-house will allow us to power the ads plan with the same level of excellence that’s made Netflix the leader in streaming technology today,” Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising, said during the presentation.

Netflix has also partnered with The Trade Desk, Google, and Magnite to expand programmatic buying beyond Microsoft.

Keep reading here.—JS

Through all the upfronts hullabaloo, advertisers might have missed some big news from Google, which is that AI search is not only ready for prime time, but is already officially rolling out in the US.

Google has been testing generative AI-enabled features in search for at least a year, but their effects on the internet ecosystem—from publishers to search advertisers to SEO experts—are still unclear.

Marketing Brew spoke with Google vet Shashi Thakur, who six months ago became the company’s VP of search ads and who leads ad products for Search and other Google tools, like Maps and Discover, about the new AI Overviews feature and what we can expect.

What can advertisers expect from AI Overviews? How do you plan on incorporating search ads within the AI experience?

The essence of AI Overview to me is that users ask a question, and we seek information from across the web and stitch it together into a coherent and readable answer. This is building on our rich history of delivering answers to our users…Over time, what we have observed is that the more you do to satisfy user needs, through answers or otherwise, users come back for more. They ask more questions, and the data grows over time.

Even as they were honing this experience…we have been showing ads alongside AI answers. You’ll see that sometimes the ads appear above AI answers, sometimes they appear right below the AI answers. They complement the content of the answer with actions for commercial intent…From the advertiser’s point of view, I would say it just presents another opportunity for them to present their commercial intent and commercial actions to users.

Keep reading here.—RB

Ready to compete? Because that’s just one of the findings in the latest report from SurveyMonkey: Marketing Trends for a New Era. Want to learn more and hear strategies for getting ahead? Register today for Curiosity Con 2024 on June 12, celebrating the power of curiosity to answer big questions and drive big results.

Executive moves across the industry.

• Kimberly-Clark, which makes Kleenex and Huggies, hired Bayer Consumer Health marketer Patricia Corsi as its new chief growth officer.
• Major League Soccer hired Chase alum Radhika Duggal as SVP and CMO.
• Siegel+Gale hired Dory Ellis Garfinkle, previously a marketing director of Lyft, as its new CMO.
• C-SPAN tapped CNN vet Sam Feist to serve as its new CEO.