NBCU plans expanded ad offerings ahead of ‘legendary’ winter sports lineup

While it’s hard to top NBCUniversal ad sales chief Mark Marshall’s pink-sequined entrance onstage at the company’s May upfronts presentation, the media giant is looking to give its advertising options some additional sparkle heading into a sports programming-packed 2026.

At a briefing at 30 Rock a few weeks ahead of CES, NBCU announced a roster of new advertising offerings, which include expanded ways to reach viewers on Peacock, more sports buying options, and AI-powered contextual targeting to support buying against news programming.

“As we enter our 100th year in 2026, we’ve never invested more in content. We’ve never invested more in technology,” Marshall said during the briefing.

Sports, of course: Some of the tools seem designed to help boost advertiser access to a blockbuster sports programming year for NBCU. Beyond airing February’s Super Bowl, NBC is airing the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, while Telemundo has the rights to the Spanish-language coverage of the FIFA World Cup. (And that’s not to mention the other programming tentpoles across baseball, basketball, football, and soccer the company has rights to.) Those include:

• Live Total Impact, a new cross-platform tool that retargets live event viewing audiences across NBCU properties, is set to scale across events, including what NBCU has dubbed its “Legendary February” sports roster.
• An expansion of Live in Browse, which automatically previews live content on Peacock’s homepage, to more sports programming, along with live entertainment properties like Saturday Night Live.
• Live sports programmatic buying will give advertisers private marketplace biddable access to the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games through partnerships with Amazon DSP, Viant, and other ad-tech vendors. (Universal Ads, Comcast’s cross-platform ads platform, will serve as the exclusive ads manager for NBCU’s coverage of the Games.)

Bird’s the word: Other new advertising tools are focused on bulking up offerings on Peacock, which last reported about 41 million paid subscribers:

• Arrival Ads, an interactive ad format, will allow brands to show up on a user’s Peacock profile page right when they “enter the platform.”
• Vertical video buying options, first previewed at CES in 2025, will become available to advertisers starting in 2026. Short-form content on Peacock consumed via mobile, the company said, has seen a 257% increase in viewership in the past year.
• NBCU is also rolling out programmatic pause ads buying, which gives advertisers the ability to buy pause ads across NBCU platforms, including Peacock, through programmatic guaranteed deals. It’s the first large premium AVOD publisher to bring full-screen programmatic pause ads to advertisers.

More is more: As advertisers continue to look for real-time insights and proof that their ad dollars are working for them, NBCU is also rolling out a number of tools designed to offer more analytics. One such tool is Performance Insights Hub, an intelligence platform built on the company’s One Platform Tech Stack that uses information from ad-tech vendors like LiveRamp, VideoAmp, and Kochava to display data related to audience insights, campaign delivery, and in-flight ad performance.

The offering will later support foot traffic and purchase data, as well as integrations that will cater to specific verticals, such as CPG and pharma.

“We’re moving from a singular, static report to actually giving [clients] an analytics portal where they can access interactive performance dashboards,” Gina Reduto, a NBCU strategy, advertising, and partnerships executive, said during the briefing. “We’re eliminating the need to wait six to eight weeks for results, and we’re equipping clients with the insights and intel they need to make decisions in real time.”

NBCU execs also highlighted growing partnerships with Instacart and Walmart Connect that are designed to leverage retail media data from both companies. NBCU has partnered extensively with Instacart around streaming, linear, and cross-platform campaigns that use Instacart’s shopper data, Reduto said; NBCU is using Walmart’s shopper data to measure cross-platform live-sports campaigns, which is designed to illustrate to advertisers that “your investment in live sports is actually moving product off shelves.”

Context is key: As the network gears up for a busy year for live programming, it’s also rolling out Contextual Targeting in Live, an offering that uses AI to monitor live content and matches ads with relevant moments.

Ryan McConville, EVP and chief product officer of advertising products and solutions at NBCU, noted the feature could be useful for advertisers who may be interested in activating against news, which could be particularly busy in 2026 with the midterm elections.

“A lot of advertisers have shied away from things like news that offer great performance and great reach because occasionally throughout a news broadcast there may be something that they don’t want to be around,” he said. “What AI allows us to do is, instead of taking news off the table completely, you can give us your custom instructions about what your brand sensitivities are, and as long as the AI is tracking and those things are not occurring, your ads are safe to run…[AI] allows us to do this real-time curation of news.”