Conan O’Brien Going on Every Podcast to Promote the 2026 Oscars

If there’s anybody who understands how considerably the cultural affect of discuss exhibits has drifted away from late night time and daytime TV to podcasts and YouTubeit could be Conan O’Brien.

The former NBC Late Night and Tonight Show and TBS Conan host ended his late night run in 2021, shifting his focus to his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. He was early to the video podcast recreation there, too, pulling clips when many different high exhibits have been nonetheless audio-only, and clips from his HBO travelogue Conan O’Brien Must Go additionally journey properly on social media.

And but, it wasn’t till final yr when he realized simply how impactful digital media had actually turn out to be, after his look on the YouTube interview sequence Hot Ones went terribly viral.

“That was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,” O’Brien told The Hollywood Reporter in a cover story this week. “If a guy can do World Series numbers with overhead that looked, to me, to be about $600, and you have every big star lining up to do his show or Chicken Shop Date …that’s when I profoundly understood that late night shows are in trouble.”

So how is he selling this yr’s Academy Awards telecast, which he’ll host for the second straight yr?

By doing Chicken Shop Datein fact. And New Heightsthe buzzy present hosted by Travis and Jason Kelce; and IMOhosted by former first woman Michelle Obama; and podcasts hosted by The New Yorker’s David Remnick and LateNighter‘s Bill Carter. Not to point out the Oscars mentions on his personal Team Coco podcasts in latest weeks.

For Hollywood’s largest night time, the host is popping to digital media as the main supply of promotion.

To ensure, O’Brien is not ignoring conventional media. I’ve spoken to THRin any case, and he additionally sat for the conventional interviews with ABC’s Good Morning America and Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC and Hulu will televise the present.) He additionally learn a class about the Oscars on Jeopardy! this week, with clips from that showing garnering tens of millions of views on TikTook and Instagram.

But it’s fairly clear the place the promotional firepower is being spent, and it is not on TV. In a world the place buzz is outlined by social media, that’s the place the host of the Oscars wants to be proven up. Last yr’s Oscars saw a five-year high in the ratingswith some crediting O’Brien’s relevance with a youthful viewers that is aware of him as the podcaster, not the late night time host.

His podcast blitz this yr highlighted that effort, seemingly strategically designed to enchantment to the leisure addicts who watch Chicken Shop Datethe ladies who watch IMO and the more and more broad enchantment of New Heightswhich has been reserving A-lister after A-lister this yr.

And it is arduous not to take a look at the blitz in gentle of the Film Academy’s choice to transfer the Oscars to YouTube beginning in 2029.

The Academy Awards are all about honoring films, however it’s a TV present at coronary heart. And in a world the place youthful folks simply aren’t watching linear TV, the Oscars want to evolve and meet them the place they’re. YouTube, with its billions of customers and international scale, is betting that it will probably take the almost 100-year-old awards present and make it contemporary and related for that subsequent technology, and its steady of creators and podcast hosts are a giant a part of the equation. After all, their platforms are the place the dialog about leisure is occurring.

So O’Brien, a creature of broadcast TV turned podcaster and HBO journey present host, is venturing to that courageous new world to promote this most old school of exhibits, as the Oscars slowly tilt in the course of the creator financial system as the place to have fun movie.