As late-night television declines, The Tonight Show host is preparing for tomorrow by building an entertainment empire based on his irrepressible joy. With the launch of his new marketing competition show, On Brand, he’s getting down to business.
IN his 11 years as host of The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon has always been an idea machine—constantly dreaming up new comedy segments, new products, even entirely new programs. He once pitched NBC a drama about a murderous priest who takes his own confession, thus absolving his soul of sin. “They didn’t like that,” Fallon says, with a characteristic giggle. “So off-brand for me, but you got to take those swings, man.”
The 51-year-old comedian’s own personal brand—hotwiring an encyclopedic love of pop culture with his hyper-enthusiastic positivity—has defined his late-night talk show, and in recent years, become an even more natural fit on game shows he has produced such as Password and That’s My Jam. It’s a collection of jobs for which NBC has made him one of the highest-paid hosts on TV, with a contract that Forbes estimates at $16 million annually.
That doesn’t mean Fallon is immune to the pressures of television’s structural decline. While Johnny Carson was the undisputed King of Late Night as the Tonight Show host for nearly 30 years, Fallon ranks third in viewership in his time slot (behind Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel), averaging 1.2 million viewers per night, and the show’s ad revenue is down 35% from 2022 to 2024, according to ad data provider iSpot TV. The abrupt cancellation in July of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—which CBS claimed was losing $40 million per year—prompted many to declare the imminent demise of late night, adding a level of urgency to Fallon’s side hustles.
Into this turbulent landscape he is launching On Brand with Jimmy Fallon on September 30, a new NBC reality competition show in the mold of Shark Tank and The Apprentice in which contestants with no marketing experience pitch campaigns for major brands such as Pillsbury, Dunkin’ and Southwest Airlines. The winning ad campaigns will appear in real life the day after an episode airs, creating what Fallon hopes is a symbiotic relationship with brands that makes the show a profit center. “It’s a new type of show,” he says, “and I think it’s a new type of business model, too.”
Fallon has always had a talent for branding. His version of The Tonight Show is perhaps best-known for its signature segments (“Thank You Notes”), games (“Egg Russian Roulette”) and sing-alongs (“Lip Sync Battle,” which also became a spin-off show) that travel widely on the internet, where he has more than 100 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and X, far more than any other late-night host.
Off air, he has collaborated on a series of whimsical products, including $195 shoes that change colors when they wear down (“Gobstompers”), pajamas with pockets (“P’Jimmies,” $78), $48 phone cases (“Pocket Dials”), sunglasses you can twirl like a fidget spinner (“Spinnies,” $95), a roller coaster at Universal Orlando (“Race Through New York”), a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor (“The Tonight Dough”), best-selling children’s books (Your Baby’s First Word Will Be DADA) and an album of original Christmas songs (Holiday Seasoning).
“If not for what he’s doing today, Jimmy should have absolutely been a marketer,” says Bozoma Saint John, the former chief marketing officer of Netflix and chief brand officer at Uber, who is Fallon’s cohost for On Brand. “He has a real ability to take an idea and make it better. And that’s really, at the end of the day, what marketing is.”
Fallon’s most well-defined brand remains his own. Since joining the cast of Saturday Night Live at 24 in 1998, he has been known for an inability to suppress his joyfulness, as in the background of iconic sketches like “More Cowbell.” When he left the show in 2004, executive producer Lorne Michaels had already pegged Fallon as a natural talk show host, and after a few years making mostly unsuccessful movies like 2004’s Taxi and 2005’s Fever Pitch, Michaels helped him secure the Late Night time slot vacated by Conan O’Brien in 2009.
Fallon performed well in a crowded landscape, and when Jay Leno abdicated his Tonight Show throne for the second and final time in 2014, NBC moved the program back to its original location in New York and named the then 39-year-old Fallon the sixth host in its history.
In those early years, his youthful exuberance proved to be ratings gold. Fallon averaged more than 4 million viewers in his first season, a staggering number by today’s standards, and dominated late night for the better part of three years. Then Colbert overtook him in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016 by leaning hard into partisan politics.
A Wizard Called Boz: Joining Fallon as a mentor for On Brand is Bozoma Saint John, the former chief marketing officer of Netflix, who is now a cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
David Holloway/Getty Images
While Fallon regularly pokes fun at Trump, he also famously tousled the future president’s hair on his show. “I think everyone has to be able to laugh. I mean, on both sides of whatever your political beliefs are,” he says. “You got to make jokes. And sometimes it’s too close to this side, sometimes it’s too close to that side, but if you can keep a balance. It feels one-sided, but this guy’s given us a lot to play with.”
Fallon is equally ingratiating with his celebrity guests, often calling them “pal” or “bud” and summoning an inexhaustible excitement for the projects they’re promoting. “I’ve had guests on where they’re, like, ‘I hope you didn’t see this movie, it’s so bad,’ ” he recalls. “I’ll just be, like, ‘We don’t have to get into details. There’s always something good about every project.’ ”
Finding a silver lining in the future of The Tonight Show requires similarly unbridled optimism. Though it still produced the most ad revenue ($78.3 million, per iSpot) in the category last year, the gap between its nearest competitor has shrunk from $30 million in 2022 to just $1.7 million in 2024. And Fallon’s massive social media following doesn’t make up for the revenue decline. In September, NBC made the decision to reduce the show’s budget by moving to four days a week.
But don’t prewrite The Tonight Show’s obituary just yet. “As a media property, it’s pretty darn valuable and really hard to re-create,” says veteran media analyst Jason Damata, CEO of the Los Angeles–based marketing agency Fabric Media.
NBC agrees, for now, because this fall it will run four special Tonight Show episodes on Sundays, using its most important program, Sunday Night Football, as a lead-in. “Which is great,” Fallon says, “because that’s kind of the only show people are watching on television right now.”
He says he will also be closely monitoring the ratings for On Brand, but even more important to the show’s success will be the campaigns it creates, which could attract brands to appear in future seasons.
“I want every company that we’re working with to write down where they’re at right now and then see where they are after On Brand happens,” he says. “I think their numbers will go up, and that’ll prove that the show’s working.”
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