In February, 2026, NBCUniversal will show the Winter Olympics from Milan, Super Bowl LX, and the NBA All-Star Game — all within ten days of each other. The company wants advertisers to get excited about possible sponsorships now.
“A lot of these will be new to NBCU” next year, says Mark Marshall, the company’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships, in a recent interview. “This is a great opportunity to unveil new technology and look how we can do things differently.”
At the annual CES conference held this week, Marshall and his team will unveil a host of new ad formats tied to live sports, which will form the backbone of the company’s offering for months to come. In addition to the aforementioned events, NBCU will have ad inventory to sell tied to a new WNBA season, a Spanish-language broadcast of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the WNBA Finals and the Big Ten Football Championship Game.
The company also plans to offer a tranche of content tied to NBC’s 100th anniversary, and will offer advertisers a chance “to connect to different eras, different shows, different talent,” Marshall says,. “We are going to bring this to life over the next year.” A celebration of the milestone appears to be scheduled for the fall of 2026. Marshall suggested NBCU will examine its work tying advertisers to this year’s 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live” in its efforts to build interesting offers.
TV’s annual ad-sales session, known as “the upfront,” typically gets underway in May. In the current climate, however, when Madison Avenue has grown intensely focused on streaming video and social media, TV networks aren’t waiting to dig deep into the programming that advertisers say they still covet — formats that still lure to big crowds all watching a specific piece of content at the same time.
“I would say just linear in general had a bit of a resurgence in the back half of ’24, spurred on by the Olympics,” says Marshall., “We have advertisers who have returned to broadcast primetime — because the hard part in streaming is getting simultaneous reach. We are seeing growth in broadcast primetime, as well as these kinds of big events.”
NBCU has reason to push. The company has invested significant amounts of cash to augment its sports lineup, which it hopes to continue to harness in a bid to get younger viewers to subscribe to its Peacock streaming service. One estimate, from Robert Fishman, a media-industry analyst with MoffettNathanson, has NBCU paying $2.38 billion a year for new NBA rights. The company is also in the midst of a $7.75 billion pact that gives it Olympics rights through 2032. The new NBA games alone could fetch $1 billion or more in ad revenue, Fishman projected in a July report.
What’s more, ad commitments for the next cycle of primetime broadcast TV fell 3.5% in last year’s “upfront” market, to $9.34 billion, according to Media Dynamics Inc., while commitments for primetime on cable tumbled 4.8%, to $9.065 billion. Meanwhile, ad commitments to streaming video hubs rose a noticeable 35.3%, hiking to $11.1 billion from $8.2 billion in the previous market. The amount committed to streaming video for the next TV season was greater than that devoted to primetime broadcast or primetime cable — a first for the industry.
NBCU is in the midst of separating its TV assets. The “new” NBC will be more reliant on the reach of broadcast TV and live streaming, while the company’s cable properties will be spun off into a new publicly traded corporate sibling.
NBCU will unveil new advertising formats tied to live sports. A new feature on Peacock will let users see live sports events scroll as soon as they open the app. Marketers will be able to sponsor these “live in browse” moments starting in January. The company will also make “pause ads” available within live events, so that advertisers can post a message to viewers should they decide to stop the action.
The ad executive suggested TV networks could see new spending overall from advertisers in the next sales negotiation, with movie and entertainment companies building fuller content pipelines after seeing them collapse during recent Hollywood labor strikes. Only the technology sector has seemed less certain about spending trends, he says, but he hopes a focus on new artificial-intelligence products and technology will lend a boost in months to come.
NBCU’s Marshall indicated the company will be putting more of a spotlight on live events, which could also include programs such as “Today,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “The Voice” and “Saturday Night Live” that are live or tied to immediate events. “The whole idea of appointment viewing should be more and more important as we go forward,” he says, “It’s harder to find the attention of consumers who spend 13 hours a day plus on media. You have got to find a way to really engage them.”