Advertisers’ wish list for advance? Sports, streaming, spectacle
TV advertisers expect to hear a lot of big requests this year, but not so many small requests.
When NBCUniversal opens the media industry’s annual “Upfront Week” on Monday, it will likely do so with conversations about the 100e anniversary of the NBC broadcast network and three different types of sports offered on Sundays. And while the media company known for shows like “Law & Order” and “Saturday Night Live” will almost certainly nod to new programming, Madison Avenue wants NBC and its media rivals to go big before they go home to decide whether to put millions of advertising dollars in their coffers — or elsewhere entirely.
As streaming video splits the once-broad TV audience into smaller viewer groups at once, advertisers are looking for properties that can still deliver the big news. Companies that can’t offer this are unlikely to do well in the “upfront” market, the annual market where U.S. TV companies try to sell most of their commercial time before the debut of their next programming cycle.
“People with low growth and mediocre streaming may find it harder to come by dollars this year,” says one TV sales executive.
Television networks are under a lot of pressure to please their sponsors. Advertisers have allocated fewer dollars to broadcast and cable TV each year for the past three years. Dollars earmarked for prime-time broadcasts in 2025 fell 2.5% to about $9.1 billion from $9.34 billion in the year-earlier period, according to Media Dynamics, a consultancy that tracks advance negotiations. Dollars spent on cable fell 4.3% to nearly $8.68 billion, compared to nearly $9.1 billion last year. Meanwhile, dollars earmarked for streaming rose 17.9%, Media Dynamics said, to $13.2 billion, up from $11.2 billion in 2024 ex ante.
Marketers will rush to pour money into programs that can still attract large audiences who will all watch at the same time, says a media buying executive. There is only limited commercial inventory available around “major tentpole events, major cultural events and sports,” this person says, and “the big advance conversations are happening where there is scarcity.”
Evidence of these conversations has already emerged. Disney is asking for $10 million for a 30-second ad in next year’s Super Bowl LXI, which will air on February 14, 2027 on both ABC and ESPN. The price is higher than you might expect early in the Super Bowl sales process, and some media agencies have pushed back on Disney’s demand, according to six people with knowledge of recent negotiations.
Many of the media companies will likely be at the forefront of sports and specials. They can charge their highest prizes for major league matches, which expire more or less once the clock runs out, along with awards ceremonies and one-off specials. In recent years, some of TV’s biggest advertisers have rushed to spend more money on sports, even though in the past they typically focused more on dramas and comedies. “We’re excited about this space and we’ve proven that we can bring new advertisers to live sports,” said Alan Moss, vice president of global sales for Amazon Ads, citing the participation of more than 80 new brands in Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” and more than 30 new advertisers in the company’s first year of NBA streamcasts. “We think live sports will continue to be an important area.”
Disney has already articulated a growing focus on live spectacle. Over the course of eight weeks in 2027, Disney’s TV and streaming facilities will show the College Football Playoffs, the Oscars, the Grammys and Super Bowl LXI – the first time ABC will show the Big Game since 2006.
Whatever the magnitude of the shift, traditional TV’s ability to rake in more advertising dollars than in the past remains suspect. As more consumers turn to streaming, advertisers will follow suit, says Brian Wieser, who tracks ad spending for the consulting firm Madison & Wall. The new streaming companies “have a lot of inventory that they should be able to monetize through advertising, and that will come at the expense of the incumbents,” he says.
According to MoffettNathanson, an independent research firm, cable ad revenue is expected to decline 10% by 2026, while broadcast ad revenue will rise 5%, largely due to the Winter Olympics and the rescheduling of Warner Bros. NBA games. Discovery’s TNT to the NBC broadcast network. Most of the new ad dollars that once went to TV are going to digital giants, the company says: “Over the past decade, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft alone have been responsible for virtually all (96%) of US ad spend growth. These four platforms now account for 65% of total US ad spend, a share we expect to reach 72% by 2028.”
However big the traditional media play may be, it may yield only small steps.
