As A-Listers Rush Into TV Ads, the Middle-Class Actor Economy Collapses
A big chill hits the shill as stars from Jason Momoa to Chris Pratt move in on commercials
I write about TV from L.A. and host Ankler Agenda with Elaine Low. I reported on the hot adult animation market, covered the microdrama boom, including a look at Disney-backed app DramaBox, and wrote about sports doc fatigue. Email me at elaine@theankler.com
Is there any day better suited to watching good old-fashioned linear television than Thanksgiving, when families are clustered together at some aunt or in-law’s house, waiting for a turkey to cook?
Aside from three major NFL games airing on CBS, Fox and NBC, there’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which last year drew in an all-time record of 31.3 million viewers — basically, a whole lotta people are going to be sitting around a screen watching a slew of traditional 30-second TV commercials, including some now enhanced with AI (Coca-Cola and Kalshi are two companies that have spots powered by the tech), instead of clicking “Skip Ad” on YouTube.
For a viewer, more ads might not sound great. For a working actor? Chef’s kiss. Especially if you’re one of the dwindling number of middle-class actors in Los Angeles or New York who still makes a living booking national commercials — as in, union TV ads that get broadcast on major linear networks across the country (not just in certain regions or markets) for a contracted number of weeks.
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Once, booking a national commercial meant bank. Ask any of your friends in SAG-AFTRA about their best year, and they’re likely to mention a national campaign for United Airlines or Bank of America that ran for months and netted them upwards of $50,000 or even $100,000 from that one job alone (every time a commercial airs, an actor’s wallet gets an extra chunk of change). Prestige TV is good for the demo reel, but a coast-to-coast Target ad gets you paid.
Now advertisers think differently: influencer marketing, pause ads (the static promos that fill your screen when you pause a streaming show), and the movement of budgets away from TV ads and into retail media networks on platforms like Amazon and Walmart are all new tactics. And ad money is seeping away from TV altogether as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram become home to more “authentic” creator-generated messaging. These shifts impact not just the quarterly ad revenues at Warner Bros. Discovery or Paramount, but also the livelihoods of thousands of performers.
Just ask 37-year-old actor Ellen Haun, who has known the joy of having a couple of six-figure years, thanks to a multi-year Xfinity TV campaign and a Discover card commercial.
“In that 2015 to 2020 timeframe, I thought that commercials were going to be the bread and butter of my income for the rest of my acting career,” Haun tells me (she’s also worked in TV, including a small recurring role on How to Get Away With Murder).
Today, here’s what’s to know in the latest shake-up in the actor economy — and what A-listers (and AI) have to do with it:
How A-listers are muscling into ads once reserved for unknowns and why
The new survival playbook for working actors as national commercials dry up and how they’re pivoting
How the streaming era is upending life for performers who rely on commercial work
Why one actor turned down a national commercial because of work in this emerging market — and why he feels great about it
How AI is seeping its way into more ads and why it could take work away from actors without running afoul of SAG-AFTRA guardrails
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