NBCU ad chief on 2026 Super Bowl deals, new AI tools and streaming ad formats for live sports

During CES, NBCUniversal will kick off sales efforts for its 100th-anniversary slate, which includes the 2026 Super Bowl, Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games and Spanish-language broadcast of the FIFA World Cup, as well as the return of the NBA to NBC and BravoCon this fall. The media company today announced a series of new ad products and capability expansions. This month, Peacock will introduce a feature that automatically streams live sports at the top of the app when users log in during an active broadcast. Marketers will be able to sponsor the “Live in Browse” feature, which will aim to grab the attention of casual viewers hopping between streamers without finding something to watch, said Mark Marshall, chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU. The announcements come a day before CES 2025 kicks off in Las Vegas, running from Tuesday to Friday. Ad Age Tech Power List 2025 We’re looking for top digital innovators from agencies, brands, platforms, ad tech companies and tech startups Enter here Peacock adds exclusive and NBC-simulcast NBA games this fall, cementing live sports and exclusive sponsorships as the key growth driver for the platform moving forward. As such, Peacock has now enabled pause ads for live event streams. NBCU is also expanding its capabilities for evaluating ad creative and pairing it with the most relevant content for marketers’ goals. The company is automating its Ad Creative Engine, which uses AI to analyze historical ad performance and provide marketers with scores for metrics including brand awareness, message breakthrough, ad likeability, and search engagement, and recommendations for creative adjustments to improve those scores. The Ad Creative Engine will also be integrated into NBCU’s One Platform Total Audience product, which will allow advertisers to both see the creative score alongside cross-platform audience targeting for planning with the media company. For example, the expansion will allow a marketer to test its Super Bowl creative based on ad performance in past games, and then use that to identify ideal inventory to place ads in after the game across NBCU’s portfolio, said Marshall. Super Bowl commercials Tracking the latest brand and agency plans Click here Similarly, NBCU has begun rolling out the ability to test the cohesiveness of ad creative with the emotional content of a show or movie it runs in. Last year, NBCU rolled out the ability for advertisers to target specific emotional or contextual triggers within content for their ads to run alongside based on AI indexing. Now, NBCU will supplement its contextual targeting by flipping the lens on clients, and scoring how well their creative matches the content. “Sometimes not all clients or creatives like to hear that their ad is not resonating as much against the KPIs they’re looking for,” said Marshall. “Everyone has realized it’s not that hard right now to find an audience, but to actually engage that audience is getting harder and harder. … So when you find them, you sure as hell better have the right creative that’s going to knock it down.” NBCU will also roll out real-time outcomes measurement for streaming campaigns after a beta period. Trials found an increased return on ad spend as advertisers were able to better optimize marketing throughout its run on NBCU platforms through the faster insights. Ad Age also spoke with Marshall about sales for the Super Bowl LX, the impact of Comcast’s announced spin-off of NBCU’s cable networks and what’s next for the TV ad market. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity How is the Super Bowl ad market different from NBCU’s last time hosting the Big Game in 2022? Interest in the Super Bowl continues to grow considering Fox sold out earlier than ever for the game. But the way we’re going to market is talking about the power of the multiplier effect that happens with having the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics back-to-back. [In 2022,] if you had run in just the Super Bowl and not the Beijing Winter Olympics, you would have missed 42 million people. And brands that only ran in the Olympics and not the Super Bowl, missed 30 million viewers from the Super Bowl. And then you add in the NBA All-Star Weekend that will also happen as well [in February 2026]. So no one’s ever had that Trifecta in the same month. Have you already been having Super Bowl sales conversations for 2026? We have not formally gone to the market, but I will say I have had multiple CMOs who have said to me in meetings, not about necessarily sports or even Super Bowl, that they want to make sure that they get their units for the Super Bowl moving forward. So this isn’t one where I think we’re going to have to push the market—the market is going to push us. Knowing all that’s happening in ’26, including the World Cup in the summer, advertisers are wanting to make sure that they’re getting the units that they want in the property they want. What factors are driving this earlier push from advertisers? There is this push back to broad, big events. And not just Super Bowl and Olympics and those. We saw it with the “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” where we sold out the parade earlier than we ever had. So it’s not just sports, it’s live events that stand out. Everyone knows how to target now. Now they need to make that targeting more effective with the right creative, but also still need these big reach events. How should advertisers expect Comcast spinning off the majority of NBCU’s cable networks into a new company to impact deals in 2025? We’re still a year away. So for this upfront and a subsequent scatter, nothing changes for the marketplace that's still going to be business as usual. We’ll sell this upfront, and, at that point, will still be one company and into the scatter market behind it. So I think we’ll be negotiating like that until we spin, and then once we spin, we’ll figure out how all of those pieces will come together and what commercial agreements happen from there. Looking ahead at 2025, what are the new or emerging trends in TV that will influence the market this year? I actually think we’re going to start to see the walled gardens who have made the walls higher—there’s an opportunity for those that are not participating in that to collaborate in new ways that provide transparency and provide content that you can't find in social platforms. So I think the word of ’25 for me will be collaboration. Read more: NBCU, Fox, Paramount, Roku and others partner on TV ad buying platform

NBCU ad chief on 2026 Super Bowl deals, new AI tools and streaming ad formats for live sports

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