The Trade Desk’s Taylor Ash on why 2025 upfronts will be a buyer’s market

After two years of relatively flat upfront growth, upfront commitments are expected to drop by $3.6 billion to $13.9 billion, according to EMarketer. But there’s a twist: streaming upfront spend is projected to double compared to 2022.

As streaming commands more share, advertisers are looking for more accountability — especially through better measurement to justify their big commitments.

To unpack what this means for deals in 2025, The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik sat down with Taylor Ash, general manager of inventory development at The Trade Desk.

How will 2025 be different from previous upfront seasons?

The upfronts are evolving quite a bit. They historically used to be around fall slates that were coming out in the TV season. And now a lot of the eyeballs have shifted to streaming. So that’s changed the complexity of what’s actually being negotiated in the upfronts.

And this year more than ever, I think, advertiser dollars are going to have to work a lot harder.

So how are partners layering on the changes that are happening in streaming? The scale that happens when you have so many shows that are released across the entire year. And then the combination of proving that your advertiser dollars are going to go further when you’re buying that.

Now we’ve got amazing content rolling out all year. With so much supply out there, what does that mean for advertisers right now?

It’s a buyer’s market. That’s pretty much how it goes. So there’s a ton of scale. And there are also a lot of different channels that are emerging, such as audio.

I think one of the most important things for advertisers is to understand, OK, with all of this scale and great content, how am I deciding what is the right audience or impression for me to buy.

And I think that’s really where technology comes into play. Adding on metadata, content signals, identity, audience targeting.

How is measurement and attribution coming in to really identify what is the right inventory for me to buy? The combination of the scale and the tech is really how I think you’re going to get your dollars to work harder.

In some ways, I think our technology has evolved faster than the deals that power them. For example, marketers are planning omnichannel strategies, but they might still be striking deals in silos. I’m curious what your view is on that. Are deals changing?

Yeah, deals used to be a way where partners were buying content in an upfront way at a negotiated rate. And now there’s all of these different things that live behind a deal, whether it’s I want to buy this specific audience, or I want to make sure that this measurement partner is a part of that deal, or I want to have first-party data come from a partner.

All of those layers increase the complexity.

It’s great for an advertiser. There’s a lot of optionality for them to figure out what works. There’s a lot of variety for them to know, OK, this is how I’m going to optimize my buys.

But at the end of the day, there has to be a way to distill the value of all this complexity that can now layer onto a deal.

I think that’s where DSPs have come into play. There’s an opportunity to manage holistic frequency capping across all of these different publishers or all of these different deals that are established. And then really consolidate the way measurement is basically being looked at.

We’re seeing a lot of sports programming move from traditional linear to streaming platforms. What is happening, and why is this space heating up so much right now?

You can’t reach your consumer if you’re only distributing live sports on just linear. When all of this content and live sports has moved into a streaming environment, it plays really nicely with all of the added value that streaming provides.

You’re able to target a one-to-one user. You’re able to have all these additional insights into what happens when you’re buying in streaming and therefore programmatic.

What that means is that there’s been historically a barrier to entry on live sports. There’s been sponsorships or minimum guarantees that have to happen in order to get access to that.

And as these really high-attention moments, where you have an extremely valuable consumer, move into a streaming space, you now can be able to access them in a way that some advertisers were never able to put that on their budget before.

What is your most unpopular opinion about advertising?

Upfronts aren’t going away.

You still have them play a really big role in things like live sports. There’s a lot of great content out there, like audio, that isn’t available to be bought through the upfronts. Audio should be one of the channels that plays a strategic role in any planning or buying.

So the upfronts aren’t going away, but there are a lot of really great places to get a high-attention viewer outside of them.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.