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Hilton Howell started Gray Media’s earnings call Thursday on a jubilant note by mentioning that the first network show produced at Assembly Studios debuted last weekend: NBC’s Grosse Pointe Garden Society.
It was followed on Monday with another production shot at Assembly, this time for CBS: the soap opera Beyond the Gates, with an African American cast. “The strikes slowed everything in 2024, but as you can tell, productions continue, and I’m really quite excited,” said Howell, executive chairman and CEO of Gray Media.
The progress comes at a time when Gray reported a 21% increase in fourth quarter revenue, compared with the same period in 2023, to $1 billion. Total revenue for the full year was up 11%, to over $3.6 billion.
Political revenue in 2024 was $497 million, “which we estimate to be the highest level of political advertising revenue among our peers, in total and on a per television household basis,” the company said in its earnings press release.
With widespread displacement of nonpolitical advertising when the election season was in full swing across the TV broadcast industry, there was little wonder Gray’s core advertising dipped. In the fourth quarter, it came in 8% lower, to $380 million. And for the full year, it was off by 2%, to almost $1.5 billion.
Pat LaPlatney, Gray’s president and co-CEO, noted that some non-political advertisers were hesitant to spend during the election. What’s more, the hesitancy continued into mid-January. Gray believes this was a result of the economic uncertainty related to potential government policy