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The glaring X sign on top of the former Twitter HQ in San Francisco is gone for now, but Elon Musk is determined to light up an anti-hate group for allegedly cramping his revenue stream style.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has forcefully disputed a Bloomberg article maintaining that a “surge” of harmful content on the Elon Musk platform has spooked advertisers.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Some of the food and drink served in the next season of the frenzied family restaurant comedy “The Bear” may just be a lot easier to recognize. After getting queries from more than 40 different advertisers after the program’s first season on Hulu, Disney has come up with ways to mix Madison Avenue more closely into the recipe of the program. Viewers are likely to see Stella Atrois, Coca-Cola and American Express’ Resy online-reservations service develop a closer relationship to the series, with products showing up in scenes and customized promotional content placed alongside the program. The goal, says John Campbell, Disney Advertising’s senior vice president of entertainment and addressable solutions, is to “allow brands and clients to get closer to the intellectual property, closer to the talent.”

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor The bill may be coming due for continued declines in TV ratings. Advertisers are pressing for rollbacks, or declines in the rates they pay for reaching TV viewers, in early “upfront” talks with TV networks, according to two media buying executives and other people familiar with these annual discussions in which U.S. media companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming. Agreements that include reductions in these rates, also known as CPMs and a measure of the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, have generally been extremely rare, and offer a signal that the continued migration of viewers to streaming and digital-video options is eroding the marketplace leverage of both traditional TV companies and some of their new-tech rivals as well.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer For its first-ever upfronts presentation, Netflix took a page out of broadcast networks’ traditional playbook and boasted about not just what series it has launching in the coming months, or even through the end of the year, but specifically calling out its fall 2023 slate. A staple of upfronts week — though not as much lately, first because of the COVID-19 pandemic and now because of the writers strike — has been the unveiling of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox’s fall lineups. This was done so advertisers knew what they were buying ads against and therefore what demos and audience size it would be most likely to reach by promoting products during those programs.

Warner Bros. Discovery announced at its upfront presentation Wednesday the launch of WBD Stream, a new digital video offering bringing together all properties in its portfolio for advertisers.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor CNN on Wednesday broadcast one of the most controversial news events of the year, a runaway town hall interview with former President Donald Trump, and advertisers like Subaru and Fidelity Investments went along for the ride. There are new questions about whether all of Madison Avenue will do so in the future. The nation’s big TV-news outlets are about to enter what should be a healthy cycle. The closer the U.S. gets to a presidential election, the more audiences tend to watch. CNN, for example, has indicated it expects to telecast more primetime town halls with candidates (last week’s lured nearly 3.31 million viewers), while Fox News Channel is expected to broadcast the Republican Party’s first primary debate in August.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” isn’t slated to kick off until the fall of 2024. But that doesn’t mean NBC has to wait until then to start lining up sponsors. NBCUniversal intends to start talking to advertisers about the possibilities in the industry’s annual “upfront” sales session, says Mark Marshall, the company’s president of advertising sales and partnerships, in a recent interview. NBC could start calling attention to the landmark season during its telecasts of the 2024 Summer Olympics from Paris, he says, which means the media company is eager to start discussing ideas soon. TV’s “upfront,” when U.S. networks try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory, is expected to kick into gear next week, when NBCU and its competitors hold a series of glitzy presentations for Madison Avenue. “Saturday Night Live” generated approximately $74,7 million dollars in ad sales in 2022, according to Vivvix, a tracker of ad spending. That figure represents a 12% dip from the nearly $85.3 million “SNL” generated in 2021.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Tucker Carlson is out at 8 p.m. on Fox News Channel, and the network hopes that a host of blue-chip advertisers that for years avoided his controversial hour will soon come back in. Since Carlson’s stunning exit last month, a timeslot that has been shunned by many Madison Avenue stalwarts seems as if it is being embraced. Procter & Gamble, one of the nation’s largest and most influential advertisers, has been running ads in “Fox News Tonight,” the network’s new 8 p.m. program, for female-skewing products like Venus razor blades by Gillette and Secret underarm deodorant. Also showing up in commercial breaks: Novo Nordisk’s trendy medication Ozempic, and Scotts Miracle-Gro.

YouTube is adding options for advertisers on its growing Shorts platform.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor After an enviable career working for traditional TV outlets, Charlie Collier surprised many a media executive late last year by leaving a senior job running entertainment programming for the Fox broadcast network to join Roku, the company that gives millions of Americans their access to the world of streaming. He hopes advertisers will follow. On Tuesday, Collier, 53, now heading Roku’s ad sales and development of content on its own platforms, will be pressed to show potential sponsors why. Roku, which boasts 71.6 million active accounts, will make a big pitch to Madison Avenue as part of a group of industry “newfront” sessions. Even though NBCUniversal, Disney and their rivals won’t make similar outreach until May, presentations this week from digital players such as Amazon and Roku are seen as an aggressive bid to win ad dollars that might previously have gone to the TV companies. After all, the networks, one secure in their ability to deliver media’s biggest audience, are losing viewers to streaming, and Roku is one of the biggest facilitators of that activity.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor If you want to run ads on Elon Musk’s Twitter from here on out, you apparently will need to pay for verified status — or buy at least $1,000 worth of advertising each month. Twitter said advertisers must subscribe to either Twitter Blue ($8/month and up) or Verified Organizations ($1,000/month) to be eligible to buy ads on the service, according to a notice titled “Building a better Twitter through verification,” shared by social media consultant Matt Navarra early Friday. A request for comment sent Friday to Twitter’s press email account received no response. According to the notice, businesses that spend at least $1,000 monthly in advertising will be automatically verified and receive a gold check-mark badge.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in a $44 billion, debt-laden deal a little over four months ago, said advertising revenue has dropped as much as 50% since he took over. But the mega-billionaire tech mogul said a few large advertisers have continued to spend with Twitter, and he specifically called out — and thanked — Disney and Apple as remaining two of the biggest marketers on the social network, speaking Tuesday at the 2023 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco. According to Musk, Twitter is improving its ability to serve timely and relevant ads. He said he was speaking with David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, who asked Musk why Twitter couldn’t put an ad with the trailer for HBO hit show “The White Lotus” next to every tweet that mentions “White Lotus.” Musk responded affirmatively, describing it as basic keyword-based ad buys that Twitter is now selling: “It’s just Google AdWords but applied to tweets.”

For a second straight year, YouTube will host its annual Brandcast pitch to video ad buyers during the heart of what had been a week dominated by traditional TV network upfronts in New York.

AMC Networks is choosing to host an in-person event during the spring upfront season, confirming plans for a presentation for about 200 to 250 guests.

Elon Musk told advertisers in an open letter today that he believes “advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform,” reassuring the group that makes up the bulk of Twitter’s revenue that ads are still welcome on the platform.

NFL ratings are booming in just about every timeslot this season, and Monday Night Football is no exception. It kicked off on September 12 and drew 19.8 million total viewers, its biggest audience since 2009.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor When advertisers take these days to MTV’s long-running “Video Music Awards,” they are hoping viewers will be as interested in what interrupts the action as they are in the trophy-winners themselves. Many of the show’s most intriguing commercials will seek to be as eye-popping as the program’s musical segments and celebrity appearances. Indeed, ad sales executives at Paramount Global, MTV’s corporate parent., say this year’s awards effort contains more in-program appearances by the advertisers’ wares than in any other years of the show, which debuted in 1984. Sponsors are “converting normal commercial time to branded content,” says Dario Spina, the chief marketing officer of Velocity, a Paramount unit that works to create specialized ad executions in the company’s content.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorTelevisaUnivision is getting more entrenched in TV’s measurement wars.The Spanish-language media giant is teaming up with data company VideoAmp, one of a growing number of audience-measurement companies whose services are being tapped as TV networks mull alternatives to Nielsen, the industry’s de factor arbiter of audience size. Under terms of the pact,  TelevisaUnivision will use VideoAmp’s data in a suite of advanced advertising solutions, giving advertisers a better sense of the viewers they are reaching and their responses to commercials.The company believes the agreement may help in its quest to draw a larger number of national advertisers to its client pool.

Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million to the Federal Trade Commission for what its chief privacy officer Damien Kieran called “a privacy incident” when email addresses and phone numbers users provided for account security purposes “may have been inadvertently used for advertising.”

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorWhere do you take advertisers if you want them to make a big purchase? To a department store, of course.Paramount Global will take clients who attend its upfront Wednesday afternoon to an after-party in the structure on New York’s Madison Avenue that once housed the big Barney’s department store, one way to emphasize the shopping aspect of the event, in which big U.S. TV companies hope to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory for their next programming cycle.As part of the affair, Paramount has dressed up four windows of the former shopping plaza.