The beauty of working with clients from all different categories, from enterprise partners to small business partners, is that we usually have a solution that we can find across an entire ecosystem. It’s going to be driven by what the marketers are looking for.
You mentioned having clients of all sizes, and we’ve already seen the first programmatic Olympics. Could we have the first programmatic Super Bowl in some way?
I would say we did have success and have continued success programmatically enabling sports, but I think we have more to come on how we’re thinking about programmatic going forward.
It seems there’s always economic uncertainty heading into the upfront. But one of the big things in the news today is the tariffs. Do you anticipate any impact from the tariffs? What’s the messaging you’re telling clients?
We’re all reading what everyone else is reading, too, but I think our opinion is that, given the changing macroeconomic climate, it’s a little too early to predict the impact on ad spend. We’re speaking to CMOs and marketers across every category to find solutions and help them maintain spend and create growth opportunities.
What we’re hearing is that, as marketers are scenario planning, they’re also looking back at the uncertainty over time. We’ve seen the research. They’ve seen the research that shows the best course of action for brands is to keep advertising to drive everything from increased sales, protect or grow market share, and maintain brand health, compared to those that may, in uncertainty, go dark.
NBCU’s ad sales chief, Mark Marshall, told ADWEEK last year that some multiyear advertisers were already talking Super Bowl. Can you talk about your approach to the Super Bowl this year and what demand you’re seeing?
I can say that we’re already speaking to marketers about the entire month of February. There is enormous interest in the Super Bowl, Milano Cortina Olympics, and NBA All-Star Game. There is a lot of interest in each component and all of them together.
I think part of that comes back to the power of live sports. Live sports for us are an incredible opportunity. We see, from an advertiser effectiveness standpoint, there’s an uptick throughout the purchase funnel due to live. We’ll have over 7,500 hours of live sports on Peacock. We’re seeing demand throughout the year, with a particular focus on those two weeks in February.
What are advertisers excited about when it comes to the World Cup?
Consumers are already excited, and this is an event that’s happening in summer 2026. There’s already massive buzz. We’ve done some research: 78% of Hispanics in the U.S. are already aware of the tournament, so that’s 13% ahead of the general population. They’re excited to be a part of this historic event. And it’s interesting because now that the World Cup is in North America, there’s a lot of excitement just about the whole ecosystem. The fact that they want to attend in person just adds to the whole fandom, and we think that fandom is going to carry through into the engagement on Telemundo.
