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Marketing Brew

NewFronts

Katie Hicks

marketingbrew.com

YouTube, which is expected to surpass Disney to become the biggest media company in the world by revenue this year, wasted no time at its NewFront event on Thursday reminding everyone that, per Nielsen, it’s currently the No. 1 streaming platform in the country.

“Audiences are watching on every screen, from their living rooms to their phones and across every video format,” Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle, VP of YouTube ads marketing, said onstage. “That unrivaled breadth spanning everything from long-story blogs to podcasts to short form makes YouTube indispensable to people’s lives today.”

Throughout the presentation, which marked Google’s second 

 to advertisers in a week’s time, YouTube executives took a page from 

 NewFronts playbooks and similarly pitched the platform as the arbiter of culture.

“YouTube is where audiences come together, not just to swap flaming memes, but to participate in culture,” Nelson-Bogle said.

 Much of YouTube’s presentation was focused on the creators who help drive the platform’s cultural relevancy and utilize its 

. Lifestyle creator Ashley Alexander, Julian Shapiro-Barnum of the social series 

, and Alisha Marie and Remi Cruz, who host the podcast 

, were among those brought onstage to talk about how they balance long-form videos, Shorts, and livestreaming on the platform, as well as share case studies from brand partnerships.

The announcements made at YouTube’s NewFront also centered on YouTube Creators, with the following tools and updates added:

A creator partnerships hub with “improved” sponsored video and creator search capabilities for brands, as well as paid and organic reporting for linked videos

New APIs that will provide insights into creator analytics

A new Insights Finder report that will return information about creators and their fans

Takeover lead-ins, which feature a personalized message from creators at the start of videos

“YouTube has breadth and depth across every screen and every format,” Kristen O’Hara, VP of agency platforms and client solutions at Google and YouTube, said in her closing remarks. “It is the place people go to for information and inspiration, with fans who go so deep on the content they love from creators they really trust.”

While it didn’t come up at the event, YouTube told advertisers in a NewFronts blog post that its AI-powered campaigns allow advertisers to “get more from [their] social strategy on YouTube.” On Monday, YouTube’s parent company, Google, 

 its AI offerings, including some new generative AI features coming to its Display & Video 360 platform.

 YouTube will host its annual Brandcast event during next week’s Upfronts, with the platform’s top execs present alongside even more creators, including MrBeast and Brittany Broski. Given YouTube’s dominance in the streaming sector, don’t be surprised if other streamers look to 

 against the platform and put their own creator- and digital-ad-related chops on full display.

YouTube puts the spotlight on creators at this year’s NewFronts

The platform is where audiences come together to “participate in culture,” Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle, VP of YouTube Ads Marketing, told the audience.

Jasmine Sheena

At Meta’s NewFronts presentation in New York on Thursday, three creators, including social series 

host Tiff Baira, participated in an onstage game show hosted by comedian Roy Wood Jr.

The stunt was an apt representation of how Meta wants to position itself as a centralized hub for the creator economy. Advertisers continue to pour billions of dollars into the space, and other companies, including Snapchat and TikTok, also spent NewFronts week emphasizing the ways they can help facilitate work with creators on their platforms.

On Thursday, Meta didn’t just talk creators during the presentation; it also touted a handful of new live and video ad capabilities all aimed at continuing to keep advertisers interested.

On the creator side, Meta is testing a trends feed in Instagram’s Creator Marketplace, a feature that is designed to help advertisers identify trending topics on Instagram Reels with links to examples of Reels that fall under the trend, so they can see the types of content and topics that are resonating with audiences. Meta’s also testing trending ads on Reels, which will also allow advertisers to show up against trending content.

“By discovering trends like ‘spring nails’ or ‘festival vibes,’ brands can get inspired to create culturally relevant Reels partnership ads for their next campaign,” Ricky Van Veen, Meta global creative strategy VP, said onstage.

Creators can also directly partner with brands on partnership ads as part of an update that will introduce a new ad format that centers creators by featuring one partner instead of two in the header. (Previously, both brand and partner had to be in the header.) Van Veen said onstage that adding creator content to partnership ads drops cost per action by 19% and increases brand lift by 71%.

Meta is also starting to test a Creator Marketplace API that will “enable partner agencies and third-party developers to easily search for and vet creators,” Van Veen said.

 Meta’s renewed emphasis on live content and video comes while the tech giant is jockeying for position in the creator economy. The company is bringing some advertising opportunities to Facebook Live, allowing brands to pay to boost livestreams from creators. Additionally, Facebook Reels is getting a video expansion tool that will work by “generating unseen pixels in each video frame to expand the aspect ratio,” creating “a more immersive and native experience,” according to the company.

The focus on video also extends to Threads, which now has over 350 million monthly active users; Meta, which just opened up ads on Threads to all global advertisers, will soon test video ads on the platform.

“We know advertisers want a more video-rich experience on all of our platforms, not just static images,” Simon Whitcombe, VP of Meta’s global business group, North America, said.

Comedian Roy Wood Jr. appears onstage with three Meta creators including three creators, including Tiff Baira, at Meta's 2025 NewFront presentation

Meta touts creator partnerships, video, and livestreaming options at NewFronts

The pitch, featuring creators like Tiff Baira and comedian Roy Wood Jr., is part of a continued creator focus from the tech giant. 

Jennimai Nguyen

What do Cynthia Erivo and Snapchat have in common? Only one has defied gravity, but they’ve both been behind the scenes of 

On Wednesday night, executives from Snap., the parent company of Snapchat, announced new, more direct ad products and a push into live entertainment sponsorship opportunities at its annual NewFronts presentation, capped off with a jazzy performance from Broadway, film, and TV star Erivo. To show off some of the new offerings, the company highlighted several successful previous partnerships on stage, including cheeky BTS footage from the 

set fronted by Erivo’s costar Jonathan Bailey that made the rounds on Snapchat this past fall.

The presentation comes after the company reached several milestones in Q1, including surpassing 900 million global monthly active users, growing revenue by 14% YoY to $1.36 billion, and increasing subscribers to its paid subscription offering, Snapchat+, by 5 million for a total of 15 million. (During the company’s earnings last week, though, the company 

 its full-year guidance, citing the difficulties of forecasting future quarters amid “macroeconomic uncertainty.”)

To help highlight the platform to more users, the company debuted its latest brand campaign, called “Say It in a Snap,” which encourages both advertisers and app users to communicate on Snapchat.

“Snaps, like a great moment, are memorable,” CMO Grace Kao said during the presentation. “Because it’s happening in the moment, it’s happening in moments that matter to your brand.”

 For brands trying to reach younger people, Snapchat is offering a chance to slide into Snapchat users’ DMs. This year, the platform is rolling out an expanded version of Sponsored Snaps, visual ads that appear like direct messages in users’ chat feeds that lead to a call-to-action message. The company is also updating its sponsored message opportunities with auction ads for both web- and app-based advertisers that want to use goal-based bids like pixel purchase, pixel add-to-cart, pixel pageview, pixel sign up, app install, and app purchase.

“Everyone knows that messaging is at the heart of Snapchat, just like we invented Stories, just like we pioneered the vertical-video format that we now see is quite common across the industry,” Ajit Mohan, chief business officer, said. “But for the longest time, brands have been excluded from tapping into this power. You told us this a lot, and we heard you, and we are now doing something really big about it: opening up messaging for marketers.”

In addition to opening up the chat feed, Snapchat is also introducing First Snap, a single-day takeover-style offering that places ad content in a premium app position; and promoted places that appear on the Snap Map, which Mohan said now reaches 400+ million people a month.

For advertisers looking to DM with the help of Snap-beloved personalities, the company is rolling out Sponsored Snaps from creators, which will allow brands to send ads that appear like messages from individual content creators like Dillian The Celebrity.

“A lot of creators I work with, they’re getting really excited about this additional way that they can connect with their communities,” Brooke Berry, head of creator development, said at the event.

 Like many companies this NewFronts season, Snap emphasized AI-powered offerings, including sponsored AI lenses and a bundle of products called Snapchat Smart Campaign Solutions, which senior director for product marketing, Abby Laursen, said will help drive brand value without sacrificing community values.

The solutions include Smart Bidding, a strategy that allows advertisers to set a target cost-per-action that Snap’s platform will automatically adjust bids and budgets to, and Smart Budget, which will allow advertisers to automatically shift spend to the highest-performing ad sets within a campaign. The latter is still in alpha testing, and more updates are to come.

 Snap has long looked to showcase sports content on the app, and sports content remains a highlight for advertisers. Both WNBA and Super Bowl content on Snapchat saw major viewership increases of 326% and 88% YoY, respectively, according to Laursen, and Snap is offering WNBA and NFL ad packages featuring behind-the-scenes footage, AR experiences, and real-time highlights ahead of this seasons’ starts.

In a new live event offering that bears shades of resemblance to NPR’s popular Tiny Desk series, Snap unveiled Under the Ghost, a music performance series hosted at Snapchat’s Santa Monica studio that will allow musical artists to connect with fans while giving brands some cultural caché.

“We know that Snapchatters aren’t just interested in discovering new music. We want to dive deeper, even more,” Laursen said.

According to Snap, Under the Ghost will offer artists the ability to engage fans more directly with intimate studio sessions and raw video clips while giving brands full-funnel media package sponsorship opportunities, including Sponsored Snaps, creator content, Total Takeover placements, and more.

While Erivo might have already dazzled a live Snap audience this week, perhaps 

 fans should keep an eye out for an Under the Ghost appearance to come.

Three images of Snapchat's interface, featuring the chat feed, an open message, and a video message still from Dillian the Celebrity. 

Snap leans into messaging ads and live events at NewFronts

The social media company is opening up its chat feed to advertisers for the first time.

It goes down in the DMs: Snap leans into messaging ads and live events at NewFronts

Alyssa Meyers

It’s been a newsy NewFronts this year. Literally.

On Wednesday afternoon, a group of news publishers convened at the Interactive Advertising Bureau-hosted event to talk about brand safety and interest in hard news content. The following morning, the New York Times put on its first NewFront presentation in six years.

But many of these publishers’ messages to advertisers focused on what they had to offer beyond their news products.

Hard news has sometimes been a hard sell to advertisers worried about brand safety, and in a news environment that’s been unpredictable and often volatile, speakers from the Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian US spent time noting to advertisers that they don’t necessarily have to spend against hard news to spend with their companies.

“We are using our time today to get you more acquainted with those lifestyle products, and that is because of how much they have grown and changed in the last few years,” NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said to advertisers. “But make no mistake, everything we do at the New York Times, everything we do in lifestyle beyond news, draws its authority and its credibility from the quality and the breadth and the scale of our news.”

 At the Times Center on Thursday, The Times spent its hour-and-a-half-long pitch giving advertisers a tour of its core products outside of news, with host Michael Barbaro of 

 podcast bringing out speakers from various Times verticals.

Levien touted some stats about engagement with games, like the fact that three times the number of people who watched the season finale of 

 (6.2 million people) play NYT games every day. And Camilla Velasquez, SVP and GM of NYT Cooking, said that vertical saw almost 500 million visits last year across its platforms, and announced new content offerings.

From The Athletic, NFL reporter and host of the 

 Dianna Russini spoke with former NFL defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh about his upcoming finance podcast, 

. Wirecutter Editorial Director Leta Shy emphasized the product recommendation publication’s expansion into coverage of beauty and skin-care products, which she said offers “excellent alignment for advertisers.”

Global Chief Advertising Officer Joy Robins closed out the pitch by discussing the Times’s appeal with Gen Z, as well as highlighting some of its new ad offerings, including the expansion of its AI-powered BrandMatch targeting tool to content beyond news.

Tusar Barik, SVP of marketing for New York Times Advertising, told Marketing Brew ahead of the presentation that the publication aimed to reintroduce itself to marketers, since the company has “fundamentally transformed” with acquisitions like The Athletic and Wordle since its last NewFront held in 2019.

“We’ve got so many different ways that people as a whole interact with the New York Times, and we are part of people’s lives very deeply,” he said. “Advertisers have this opportunity to really be part of that as well, and we’ve actually seen tremendous growth in our advertising business because of it.”

 Prior to the Times’s dedicated dog-and-pony show, executives from the Guardian US, NBCUniversal, Yahoo Ads, and the Washington Post had a conversation on the IAB’s main stage about how advertisers can better embrace hard news in their campaigns. Largely, they said, IAB efforts to encourage advertising against news content are paying off, but they acknowledged that some buyers and CMOs still have concerns.

In addition to discussing the use of block lists, emphasizing ROI on ads that run alongside news, and noting that they are reaching young audiences, some of these execs also mentioned softer content.

Marcia Lesser, VP and head of sales at Yahoo Ads, spoke about the company’s partnership with the AI content startup Goodable to curate “good” news. And Sara Badler, chief advertising officer, North America, for the Guardian US, noted the publisher’s efforts to expand into more multimedia, including games.

 Video was another common topic of discussion for news organizations at NewFronts. Johanna Mayer-Jones, global chief advertising officer at the Washington Post, brought up the publisher’s 

 TikTok strategy, and in her closing remarks for the Times, Robins mentioned a “focus on video” across verticals.

It’s a common refrain for an event that has increasingly touted digital video opportunities, and LinkedIn similarly 

 during its first-ever NewFront presentation on Monday.

the Wordle app, from the New York Times, on a mobile phone screen

Publishers say they have more to offer than hard news at NewFronts

The New York Times spent the majority of its presentation highlighting its other offerings, including games, cooking, and sports.

Khartoon Weiss, VP of global business solutions, kicked off TikTok’s 2025 NewFront presentation with a simple 

“TikTok is here,” she said. “We’re here.”

Without explicitly naming the existential 

, TikTok executives made the case to advertisers Tuesday afternoon that the platform isn’t going anywhere. During her speech, Weiss said the company is “confident in the future of this platform,” perhaps due in part to 

 made by President Donald Trump earlier this week where he said he has a “warm spot in [his] heart” for TikTok and would grant the platform an additional ban extension if it does not find a US-based buyer by June 19, when the current extension ends.

 in a row where TikTok was faced with reassuring advertisers amid a drawn-out legal battle over the future of the platform. This time around, speakers onstage repeatedly made the case for TikTok as the brand-safe platform du jour for creating and engaging with cultural moments.

“Go to Settings, check your screen time. You know the monster you have become,” emcee and comedian Hasan Minhaj said during the presentation. “[TikTok] is where culture starts and where it evolves and where it spreads.”

 At Tuesday’s event, the platform announced new ad products and updates designed to place advertiser content next to trending and cultural content, including Sponsorship Solutions, which puts advertiser content in search results.

TikTok also announced that it’s continuing to build on its Pulse Suite offerings with Pulse Core, which guarantees placement next to top trending UGC based on categories like holidays, sports, or beauty. Also in the Suite is Pulse Premiere, which places ads next to professionally generated content from publishers like Disney, Hearst, the NFL, and Paramount. Formula 1, Red Bull Media, and Warner Bros. Discovery were announced as new Pulse Premiere partners at the event.

 While TikTok’s execs pitched advertisers in New York on “industry-leading” data protection, the platform 

 it was opening a data center in Finland as part of its “Project Clover” EU data privacy initiative that seeks to protect sensitive European user data. The announcement came just days after the EU hit the platform with a $600 million fine around the platform’s data-protection 

 Weiss closed out TikTok’s NewFront event with additional reassurances to attendees. “Our advertising business, ladies and gentlemen, will not change,” she said. “We remain open for business and we stay streaming.”

TikTok’s message to advertisers: We’re not going anywhere 

At its NewFronts presentation, TikTok executives assured advertisers that its business “will not change” as they emphasized the platform’s cultural centrality. 

Roku is no Netflix, but it’s no underdog either. The streamer and smart-TV company posted $881 million in revenue in Q1, a 17% YoY increase, according to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings, and its video advertising revenue has grown faster than overall platform revenue.

As the company looks to keep scaling, it has been building up its ad-tech offerings. The company, which opted out of hosting a traditional NewFronts presentation this year, is now leaning on its programmatic capabilities to appeal to advertisers navigating a difficult economic landscape, Roku execs said during the company’s Q1 earnings call.

“If we look at our execution over the last two years, it’s really positioned our business…to navigate environments like we’re seeing now with the macro-uncertainty,” Anthony Wood, Roku CEO, said. “We’ve really diversified our revenue streams; we have more diversified ad products, and we’re less reliant on M&E.”

 Roku has been moving away from being “more of a walled garden” to making its data more accessible through third-party ad-tech integrations, Sarah Harms, Roku’s VP of advertising marketing and measurement, told Marketing Brew. To that end, the streamer inked measurement deals with iSpot in April 2024 and, more recently, Incrmntal (which is, you guessed it, an incrementality measurement platform) in February. In January, Roku introduced its 

 product, which allows advertisers to access Roku viewer preference data when making inventory buys through Roku Exchange, which itself is linked to several DSPs. 

The partnerships all point to a bigger goal. Amid “economic volatility,” Roku execs are hoping advertisers will view CTV as a performance channel, and measurement partnerships are a key part of getting advertisers to see that, Harms said.

“Data Cloud is really just…tying a bow around any of our data applications or assets: making our data available to a holding company for planning or measurement, but also exploring deeper partnerships with a measurement company to share data to improve their methodology,” she said.

On the earnings call, Wood echoed Harms’s message, telling analysts that advertisers tend to look for performance during times of economic uncertainty. Roku’s home-screen marquee video unit, for example, has been popular with advertisers looking for performance buys, Charlie Collier, Roku Media president, said on the call.

While Collier said on the call that the company is seeing advertisers shift spend from “longer-term guaranteed commitments to shorter-term, nonguaranteed campaigns, usually executed programmatically,” execs emphasized that they believe Roku is well-positioned to deal with headwinds, largely thanks to its ad-tech investments.

“Over the past couple years, we’ve focused on building our programmatic capabilities, and that investment is absolutely paying off in an environment like this that demands agility,” he said.

Roku logo appears on a mobile phone screen, with the Roku logo in the background

 Roku leans on ad-tech investments to navigate rocky economic climate

 In an environment that “demands agility,” company execs are framing CTV as a performance channel.

Alongside the well-dressed execs who appeared onstage at the Tubi NewFront presentation in New York on Tuesday was TikTok star Noah Beck.

Beck joined Tubi to hype up the upcoming original movie he’s starring in for the streamer, 

which premiered on the streamer in November, and is part of the Fox-owned streamer’s growing slate of original content. Tubi also held a panel featuring young creators creating long-form content for the streamer through its 

As it highlighted several new ad products tailored to specific advertising verticals, Tubi execs doubled down on the message that it’s a platform for reaching younger audiences.

“Whether they’re tuning into a shoppable red carpet at the Super Bowl or flocking to a Wattpad-inspired original, we get the next generation,” Tubi CEO Anjali Sud said onstage.

The free streamer, which counted over 97 million monthly active users in January, has been intent on bringing new users into the fold. In February, it streamed the Super Bowl 

, with the caveat that viewers had to sign up for accounts on the service in order to watch.

It’s also working on growing its appeal to advertisers. To that end, Tubi debuted several new ad formats at its NewFronts presentation, including:

 Studios can promote their content through homepage-takeover ads that feature animated backgrounds and trailers that play automatically.

Brands can now leverage carousels to create “immersive virtual showrooms or product showcases” on Tubi’s homepage. Carousels can also be configured to include QR codes or other CTAs. The format is geared toward CPG, auto, and tech brands.

 The streamer is tagging specific scenes in its programming based on tone, sentiment, and visual cues, and brands can opt to align their content alongside scenes that contextually make sense with their offerings.

: Tubi is offering a dedicated Tubi Shop product that allows brands to build storefronts. Tubi Shop comes on the heels of Tubi and Shopsense AI’s second-screen storefront feature, which rolled out in February.

For more risk-averse advertisers, Tubi Prime guarantees ad placement next to the streamer’s “most popular, brand-safe content,” including programming that’s popular with Gen Z or part of Tubi’s top 50 shows and movies.

“Relevance is what keeps young audiences engaged,” Mike Bidgoli, Tubi’s chief product and technology officer, said onstage.

 Tubi is also rolling out the ability for advertisers to make animated, silent, looping video pause ads.

 that are designed to make ad buying and measurement easier. At the presentation, the company detailed several new ad-tech partnerships, including with Amazon’s DSP, where Tubi’s inventory is now available to buy. The streamer also inked a deal with Moloco, a CTV ad-tech platform designed to grow app installs and engagement.

One the measurement side, Tubi is partnering with Kochava for Publishers. It also inked deals with other measurement platforms aimed at specific industries: NCS will support e-commerce, pharma, finance, and QSR, and S&P’s Global Mobility Polk will support auto.

These announcements, too, are aimed at being attractive to different industries, whose advertisers have specific needs.

“We know that the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work,” Jeff Lucas, Tubi’s CRO, said.

Tubi's virtual showroom ad format, which was announced at the company's 2025 NewFronts presentation 