Megan McCarty Carino

We do continue to see a consumer that is looking for the larger, more technologically advanced vehicles.

The upfronts started back in the 1960s, and the way television networks sell advertising hasn't really changed since then, says Tim Hanlon, a media consultant at the Vertere Group.

This year's upfronts included an actual song and dance routine from NBCUniversal featuring Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers.

Networks typically sell almost all of their inventory for specific programs at specific times up front like this.

Get it?

Up front?

Compare that to ads online, which are constantly shuffling and adjusting in real time based on who's looking and what's working.

It's called programmatic advertising, says TV analyst Alan Wolk.

NBC, Universal, Warner Brothers, Fox, and other traditional television companies are now trying out this automation, using AI agents to buy and sell ads in a more responsive way, so campaigns could adjust based on what's on screen.

Networks are also trying to provide more timely data about whether an ad actually drives business rather than just how many eyeballs see it.

But that's harder to do with a TV than a mobile device.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

This week, Cloudflare, Coinbase and PayPal announced job cuts after mass layoffs at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon earlier this year.

But the tea leaves of tech jobs are hard to read, says Guy Berger, senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute.

Like, is AI eating jobs and when's it coming for mine?

But Berger says many of the companies culling jobs now could still be right-sizing from pandemic expansion.

Because AI is not a boogeyman to Wall Street investors, says Gregory Dacco, chief economist at EY Parthenon.

So companies have an incentive to attribute any downsizing to AI.

Still, he says, automation is likely a factor.

But reports of the death of coding have been greatly exaggerated, according to Corey Staley.