NBCU’s Upfront Pitch Puts Assets ‘All Together’

The pride is back in the peacock. NBCUniversal CEO Stephen Burke invited the press up to its headquarters at 30 Rock to do a little pre-upfront boasting about how well the NBC broadcast network is doing among the 18-49 year old viewers that are so important in winning the ad sales game.

On the chairs in the conference room were a set of charts and graphs showing NBC as No. 1 with Today, Nightly News, primetime, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

“That’s the grand slam of network television,” Burke said, adding that NBC was going into the upfront “in better shape than we have been for a decade.” CBS CEO Les Moonves, no shrinking violet, has been predicting at financial conferences that he expects his network to lead the broadcasters in volume and price increases. But Linda Yaccarino, NBCU’s aggressive ad sales president, won’t settle for second best. NBCU has rolled out a new slogan “All Together. Different.”

While CBS has the most watched network in total viewers, NBCU has an array of assets and a sales structure reporting to Yaccarino designed to slice and dice them according to client needs.