Brian Norris started his career in TV sales at Lifetime in 1999, a job that bears little resemblance to what he does today as CRO of The E.W. Scripps Company.
Back then, TV meant “linear,” ad sales meant “traditional GRPs” and the buyers were almost exclusively large brands working through holding companies, he says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“The business was completely different,” Norris says.
Today, TV is everywhere, measurement is about performance and the buyer mix includes small and midsize brands that used to spend almost exclusively on social.
Scripps itself has legacy roots. It was founded nearly 150 years ago by journalist and newspaper publisher Edward Willis Scripps as a print-focused news organization before expanding into radio and then TV in the mid-20th century. These days, it’s best known for its large footprint of local TV stations and the national ION network.
Now, Scripps is using its distribution backbone to lean into women’s and local sports by behaving less like an incumbent and more like a challenger.
Rather than treating women’s sports as a side bet, for example, Scripps is building around them, with WNBA franchise nights, National Women’s Soccer League matches and Professional Women’s Hockey League games on ION alongside video content designed to tell deeper stories about the athletes themselves.
At the same time, Scripps is investing in local sports rights and a new FAST channel that streams live events and original programming as an antidote to subscription fatigue and paywalls.
“Sometimes you just want free,” Norris says. “We saw that as an opportunity for us to surprise and delight advertisers and audiences.”
The pitch to both brands and viewers centers on flexibility. Because Scripps has ION, local stations and streaming inventory, it’s able to create different combinations of national, local and CTV depending on whether a marketer is optimizing for reach, specific regions, performance or all of the above.
“It is never our intention to say ‘no’ to an advertiser,” Norris says. “We really want to say ‘yes.’”
Also in this episode: How fragmentation can be an opportunity rather than a curse, a preview of how Scripps will position its sports portfolio during this year’s upfronts and why Norris believes GLP-1 weight-loss drugs will reshape marketing strategy even more than AI.
