COVID-19: Redesigning the NewFronts for Flexibility and Streaming

With uncertainty over the COVID-19 virus growing, IAB is introducing new tools and channels to enable the digital marketing and media industry to interact and transact during the annual Digital Content NewFronts marketplace.

IAB’s plan is to add a video-streaming option to let consumer brands, advertising agencies, and publishers design their individual events and meetings to fit their business needs, and facilitate decision-making and buying.

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Working with independent partners, IAB will enable all presenters to stream your NewFronts presentations to the audiences you invite, giving your unique multimedia content, services, and technologies the widest possible exposure among qualified buyers in the U.S. and abroad. To be clear, based on feedback from longtime NewFronts participants, IAB strongly recommends streaming-only productions for all presenters. IAB is committed to supporting the industry and believes that the new streaming option we’re outlining here allows for the most flexibility to serve your specific requirements.

Production Flexibility

• Any presenter has the choice of producing a live, standalone presentation, as publishers have done since the birth of the NewFronts eight years ago; producing a fully streamed NewFronts presentation; or, creating a blend of a live-plus-streamed show.
• Adding to the flexibility, publishers can choose to stream from a central IAB production facility, or from a facility of your own choosing.
• If you prefer, presenters will be able to stream pre-produced, edited NewFronts presentations, and take advantage of all the creativity digital video allows.

• Presenters will be able to use your own platforms or domains to host the streamed events, with IAB redirecting users to proprietary domains, or viewers will be able to access the presenter’s content directly through the IAB streamed option.
• An all-streaming option is probably the best choice for all presenters, and we recommend it, but the option for live presentations will remain in place.

Audience Flexibility

• Presentations will be protected – only qualified attendees will be able to log in – but presenters will be able to augment your own guest lists with additional, qualified attendees brought to you by IAB. For those who want their live or pre-produced events open to the world, that option will certainly exist, as well.
• Whether you stream your work live, or produce it entirely in advance, your presentations will remain available for logged-in video-on-demand access for the duration of the NewFronts season and after.

The television network Upfronts, video NewFronts, and Podcast Upfronts are essential media-industry events, and vital to the way consumer brands do business. The goal is to help keep the entire industry open for business, come what may. In fact, done right, streaming the NewFronts will permanently enhance and augment these indispensable media, agency, and brand marketplaces:

Bigger audiences. The total NewFronts audience will grow larger; brand and agency decision-makers, both junior and senior, will be able to virtually attend live shows without time-consuming or expensive travel.

All the benefits of streaming. Decision-makers will be able to access NewFronts on-demand programming at any time. Publishers will be able to add complementary programming – from fireside chats with brand leaders, to live on-demand interviews with entertainment superstars, to vivid descriptions of their new B2C and B2B technologies, to unveilings of proprietary research – to provide more depth and breadth to your formal presentations.

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A truly “new” NewFronts. By adding a streaming option to the NewFronts, we’ll transform the NewFronts and Upfronts into the 21st Century media and the brand marketplace they were meant to be – a benefit that will last long after COVID-19 is relegated to the history books.

The IAB NewFronts team has already begun reaching out to presenters and agencies with these plans, taking in feedback, and helping get them launched on the road to NewFronts 2020.