How marketers are conquering the ‘tsunami of supply’ from live events

Last December, the NFL’s Washington Commanders clinched their first playoff berth in four years with a thrilling overtime win against the Atlanta Falcons on NBC and Peacock’s Sunday Night Football.

But it wasn’t just the team celebrating — marketers were likely thrilled, too, as they could buy the extra, unexpected ad slots in the post-regulation commercial breaks via real-time bidding.

While live sports’ move into streaming has been widely publicized, it’s now the back-end infrastructure that’s catching up.

Over the past year, advancements like preapproved creative, cleaner supply paths and richer content signals have helped scale addressable ad buying during live games. NBCUniversal and Disney are among the power players leading the charge.

NBCUniversal streamed 3,200 Olympic events last summer on Peacock, marking the first time it opened up programmatic buying during the games. All 329 medal events were aired live, leading NBCUniversal to stream up to 300 live events a day. While the entertainment giant has been offering programmatic buying in some form during live events and sports since 2022, this was a grand moment for the entertainment giant.

That surge of inventory paid off for NBCUniversal, amounting to a 90% increase in first-time advertisers during the Olympics.

“We know that there’s buyer demand for it,” Katie Millington, FreeWheel’s executive director and head of demand integrations, tells The Current.

“It’s a really complicated thing to get right in the moment because you’re trying to serve an ad when there’s millions of people tuning in and watching it, which puts a lot of stress on the servers and the system.”

Demand is only growing: 70% of NBCUniversal’s programming is live events, according to President of Advertising and Partnerships Alison Levin.

In fact, an estimated 54% of ads viewed in the U.S. in the first half of 2024 came from live events, per FreeWheel’s Video Marketplace Report.

Streaming’s tsunami of supply

Millington and Index Exchange’s CEO, Andrew Casale, both describe the acceleration of live events as the greatest opportunity and challenge in the connected TV (CTV) space.

But where Millington sees an industry ready to take advantage of this supply, Casale doesn’t.

“Live and CTV is a very punishing problem,” Casale said onstage during IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting.

“From an infrastructure perspective, every single device wants an ad in the same moment. Every Roku stick, every smart TV, when you go to a commercial break, they all hit the infrastructure of programmatic in a really punishing way. And we are not as an ecosystem ready for it.”

Casale estimated that the programmatic market handles 500 billion ad transactions daily. A single live event can generate a million bid requests coming in a second, which Casale describes as a “tsunami of supply.”

Creating standards to capture supply

To help address the strain, the IAB Tech Lab has plans to finalize new standards for real-time bidding for live events this summer. These include richer content signals — like genre and event type — something that FreeWheel has already been using. Millington describes those signals as “the vegetables” in the recipe of a programmatic buy.

They may not be glamorous, but this transparency can feed a strong, healthy and full ecosystem for advertisers.

Disney is also expanding its ad inventory for real-time bidding, rolling out live certification to help brands leverage spikes in viewership so they can scale during lightning-in-a-bottle moments.

“Real-time programmatic is the game changer, and we’re doubling down to ensure advertisers seize these opportunities like never before,” Disney Advertising’s SVP of addressable sales, Jamie Power, said in January.

Part of Disney’s certification includes preapproving creative — a tactic FreeWheel launched last June before the Olympics on Peacock to ensure the ad is not blocked in the moment and the publisher doesn’t miss out on any revenue.

Both companies are also simplifying the supply chain. Disney is giving advertisers a direct path to Disney+ and Hulu inventory, while FreeWheel is also streamlining its ad-buying process.

“Publishers and advertisers have to be mindful of the additional hops that will create that latency and the additional duplication,” Millington says. “All of this is kind of riding on those few seconds that you have in order to make an ad appear.”

Biddable gold

Ten years after FreeWheel enabled the first programmatic live sports buy in the U.S., the industry has matured.

Over the past year, Power said that Disney’s ad business has flipped from being roughly 60% programmatic guaranteed and 40% biddable, to mostly biddable. Upfront commitments account for 70% of the biddable spend on all of Disney’s properties.

The NBA playoffs and finals are next on deck, followed by NBCUniversal’s NBA debut in October under a $76 billion rights deal. Add in the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and World Cup on Telemundo in 2026, and there’s plenty of premium sports content coming to NBC for its 100th anniversary.

With Olympic rights secured on NBC and Peacock until 2036, the race to optimize live sports streaming is just getting underway.