NBC has sold out of about 85% of its commercial time in Super Bowl LVI, the company announced today.

With seven months still to go, NBC is pacing way ahead of where it was at the same point when it last aired the Big Game in 2018, says Mark Marshall, president, advertising sales and client partnerships, NBCU—adding that NBC doesn’t typically reach the same level of sold time until January.

The demand, Marshall says, is driven by smaller advertisers who are buying ads for the first time, which was also seen during the 2021 game. It is a trend NBC has seen during other sports programming and tentpole events from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to red carpets, says Marshall. “A lot of smaller advertisers are coming in and trying to get buzz out of tentpoles. These events are no longer reserved just for big advertisers,” he says.

Marshall categorizes these advertisers as “mid-tier” brands that are buying the game and other tentpole events and using it to build digital and social strategies.

NBC is asking for as much as $6 million for a 30-second commercial, which is inclusive of broadcast, streaming and Hispanic airing, Marshall says. This compares to the $5.6 million CBS asked for during the 2021 game. 

In some instances, NBC is also requiring Super Bowl advertisers to match inventory in the Beijing Winter Olympics, which will air starting on Feb. 4 next year, according to multiple media buyers. The Super Bowl—which will take place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles—will air on Feb. 13, in the middle of the Olympic games.

Marshall says NBC is packaging the Super Bowl in many different ways, including the Olympics, Sunday Night Football and the World Cup, which will air in November and December, 2022.

As of the week of July 4, NBC had only two premium positions left to sell—the so-called “A” and “Z” pods—which are the first and last ad units in a commercial break, according to media buyers. And there are only a handful of spots remaining elsewhere in the game. Marshall declined to comment on which inventory is sold out and which is still available. 

Those last few spots have historically been the hardest to offload.

Contending with COVID

CBS, which aired Super Bowl 2021, didn’t announce it was 80% sold out of ad inventory until about two months before kickoff.  Of course, the eye network had the height of COVID to contend with, which created uncertainty not only about marketers’ ad budgets for the year, especially those who had an out-sized presence in the game like movie studios, but also around whether or not the Big Game would be played at all.

This created an interesting mix of Super Bowl advertisers, with many atypical brands that received a boost from COVID trends running commercials in the Big Game for the first time.

Outside of the Super Bowl, NBC has also seen strength in ad commitments for Sunday Night Football during its upfront negotiations, Marshall says, calling it “the most successful Sunday Night Football we have had.” 

Live sports continued to be a business drive during this year's ad haggle, with Disney also seeing growth in the sports marketplace, according to people familiar with negotiations. 

NBC entered this year’s upfront marketplace with plenty of inventory to sell, which aside from Super Bowl LVI and the Beijing Olympics, also includes the postponed Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which will kick off on July 23. Marshall declined to provide details on the state of advertising in the Tokyo Games, but said there was an uptick in spend in categories including technology, healthcare and restaurants compared with the Rio Games in 2016.