Big dreams for new Warner Bros. Discovery in ad presentation

In what was essentially a public debut on Wednesday, leaders of the new Warner Bros. Discovery portrayed the media giant as effectively a fifth U.S. broadcast television network, with even bigger aspirations.

“Our goal is to build the most dynamic media and entertainment company in the world,” David Zaslav, the company's CEO and president, told an audience of advertisers at New York's Madison Square Garden.

The 6-week-old company, created out of a corporate merger, was making its first “upfront” presentation, where television and other media companies try to convince Madison Avenue representatives to purchase ads over the next year.

“I'm a little nervous,” said Zaslav, name-checking celebrities like Mike Rowe and Chip and Joanna Gaines that he spotted in the audience. “It's a big moment for us.”

Yet in a forum known for bravado, Zaslav wasn't shy.

He compared the moment to when Rupert Murdoch created the Fox network to compete with ABC, CBS and NBC in the late 1980s. But he said, “we would have to combine all four of the broadcast networks together to achieve the reach that we have alone.”

With CNN and Discovery, the new company has a strong worldwide presence. For television viewers and streamers in the United States, it's a diverse and disparate collection of assets, including HGTV, the Food Network, TBS, TLC, CNN, HBO and the HBO Max and Discovery+ streaming services.

That made for some odd juxtapositions at the presentation, like the slide that lumped together upcoming events like Discovery's “Shark Week,” Animal Planet's “Puppy Bowl” and CNN's coverage of the midterm election.

Jennifer Hudson, who is starting a syndicated talk show this fall for the company's Telepictures division, did an awkward onstage sample of it with two HGTV stars, rapper Lil Jon and...