NAB 2025 Spotlight: Fireside with The Trade Desk's new Ventura OS; Feting Penn & Teller; and a Stephen A. Smith keynote; what to get into (and stay out of) in Vegas

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DANIEL FRANKEL: David, I hear you’re headed to Las Vegas for the second time in two weeks for NAB, a 102-year-old broadcaster conference with steadily declining attendance. Right on! Registrations were down nearly 6% in 2024 YoY … and by nearly a third since pre-pandemic 2019. Still, I’ll admit that I attended this event regularly — and enjoyed the heck out of it — as a reluctant member of the “show daily” team at Future plc., before they drowned Broadcasting & Cable and the rest of my group in Caesar’s water fountain last fall. Future is still trying to generate honoraria sponsorships by keeping the zombie corpse of the Broadcasting+Cable Hall of Fame alive, sans the venerable trade publication that propped it up and gave it any credibility it had. The 2025 class of 14 inductees — ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro, AMC Networks CEO Kristin Dolan and Drew Barrymore among them — was announced Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Future folks still have the NAB show daily business. Maybe this humble enterprise of ours takes it from them one day, David. Those bloodless Bath bastards are charging $10,500 for a full-page show-daily print ad. We’d do it for Penn & Teller tickets.