Inside NBC’s Sports-Ad Olympics

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1:05Congratulations, you made the varsity for the podcast. My name is John O 'Ran, and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. Today, we're joined by Mark Marshall. Mark has a big title. He's NBCUniversal's Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships, which basically means that he runs ad sales for NBC and Peacock. We're still a month away from the Olympics opening ceremony in the Super Bowl, and NBC is completely sold out of both. So that's going to be a big topic for the two of us today. But before we get to Mark, today is Wednesday, January 7th, and here's what I'm watching.

1:40Were you as surprised as I was to see that the biggest NFL game this weekend, at least as far as national TV goes, went to Amazon? Judging from the number of texts that I received Sunday night and Monday morning, the initial View wondered if the NFL gave a favor to Amazon in the hopes that Amazon is going to continue to bid up league rights. But the actual story of how Amazon got the Packers Bears does not have nearly as much intrigue. It does, though, highlight a thorny decision tree that the NFL has to navigate at the end of each season. First, it's important to note that this was the NFL's decision.

2:15The league's media partners, well, they submit wish lists, but the NFL decides who gets what. And the NFL, well, they don't look at wildcard weekend in isolation. They make their choices based on a three-week stretch, starting with the final weekend of the regular season. Now, this weekend, two games stood out, Bears-Packers and 49ers-Eagles. Now, since expanding the playoffs to 14 teams in 2020, the NFL has preferred to slot one of its four or five games on Monday night, and the league viewed the Texans-Steelers as a stronger Monday night option this year. Fox, meanwhile, they were scheduled to carry two wildcard games, at least one of which had to be an NFC matchup given its role as the conference's traditional broadcaster.

3:01The NFL opted to place 49ers Eagles in Fox's late Sunday afternoon window, which, of course, delivers the largest audience on TV. The NFL then decided to anchor Saturday night with the other marquee game of the weekend, Packers-Bears. that meant it went to Amazon Prime. And that's the story. Okay. Now let's get to Mark Marshall. Mark, it is great to have you on the pod here. Thank you very much for joining us. And I kind of want to start before we talk about the news of the day. The big news is that you sold out the Winter Olympics and we're going to get into that in depth coming up. The thing that I find unique about your situation right now overseeing NBC ad sales for sports, for everything, is that in the past, whenever NBC had the Olympics, it wanted to shy away from the Super Bowl.

3:59Just in terms of hospitality, in terms of ad sales, and in terms of everything. Take me through, when did you decide it's actually going to work better if we put these two together and move forward as just kind of one monolith. And I'm not even including the NBA All-Star in with that as well. Yeah, it was definitely a conscious decision. Always sports and Olympics ran in parallel. And in essence, sometimes we're competing with each other for advertiser dollars. But we started this meeting in December of 23 that we started to prep for this legendary February. And we went to the marketplace, the advertisers, and said, we should look at this together.

4:46Because while we think about often all sports fans are the same, if you're an advertiser and you just bought the Olympics, you missed 30 million people that ran in the Super Bowl, that watched the Super Bowl as well. And conversely, if you bought the Olympics, you missed 30 million people who were in the Super Bowl. So flip-flop those two. But the fact is, there's a unique audience that isn't watching both events. So how do we market to them differently? How do we sell to the advertisers differently? And then most importantly, how do we give advertisers more bang for their buck by combining the two?

5:22And so it really was a conscious decision back in 23, where we started to bring all the pieces together. What happened before that? Because it seems to me almost like a boots on the ground situation where in terms of hospitality, where are you going to be? I'm assuming you're flying back and forth between Italy and San Francisco. Yeah, I will start the week. I'll go out to San Francisco on Monday and be out there for media day and the week. And then after Tirico goes off air, a group of us head over to directly to Milan and then we'll be there through the end of it. So I won't make it back for the NBA All-Star weekend.

6:02but after being at Turner sports for 15 years, uh, I have a good sense of the NBA. You know, what goes on that weekend, Mark, it's, it's outstanding. Um, but, uh, we're excited and to have it, you know, in San Francisco, obviously not overly convenient to Milan, um, and then back to LA. So there'll be a lot of traveling back and forth, but, you know, I think we production wise, I think we have 3000 people between Stanford and Milan and San Francisco. So it spreads the theme, the group pretty thin. But where else would you want to be to be able to do the Olympics and Super Bowl all at once? And then, you know, as we're doing this planning, we just go and pick up the NBA and then move that in there as well.

6:47So it's been an unbelievable couple of years for us. So you made this decision about two, three years ago in order to do it. What surprised you? What happened that you didn't necessarily expect as you went through this process? of selling the Super Bowl right alongside the Olympics? Well, I think the biggest thing was the Super Bowl always is a little bit of its own unique marketplace that you have advertisers that come in as just Super Bowl advertisers that come in. And we were able to go to them and say, look, there's a way to extend your reach. You're going to spend, some of these people will spend$8 million on a piece of creative and run it once in the Super Bowl.

7:29Our pitch to them was, why don't you use that entire two-week period to really extend the reach of what your message is going to be? And between the Olympics and the Super Bowl, it's two of the strongest things in regards to advertising, recall, message memorability, likability, all of that. So that what surprised us was that we hadn't done it prior. And I think part of it was also our team just came together as one organization as well. And we also have just great production people that are able to link it. And so I think for the leagues as well, it's a great promotional vehicle. You think about Super Bowl Sunday, you know, you're going to start off with Olympics and you'll have Lindsey Vaughn hopefully skiing on pregame before the pregame of the Super Bowl into the Super Bowl, then back to the Olympics.

8:23So it actually provides promotion for both of them. And it also brings in that casual fan, which we all need. You know, I use it. My example is I have an Aunt Debbie who lives in Atlanta. And if I get Aunt Debbie to watch a sport, I know we did a good job. And so that's what I strive to figure out. How do we find ways to have that casual fan be able to come in and watch sports? And so it's worked extremely well and vice versa, how to use the sports, make people watch the other programming that we have. What will it take to get Aunt Debbie to download the Varsity podcast? Is that going to happen?

8:59She's pretty tech savvy, Aunt Debbie. I think she's probably, I would say late 60s. I don't want to guess wrong on that one, but she's tech savvy. We'll get her lined up. Yeah. Guess on the low side, Mark. Hey, well, let's go to the story of the week. A ton of headlines coming out Tuesday. day. Congratulations. Sold out the Olympics one month beforehand. I've covered this often enough. If I come to you, you're going to find some space for me, right? Or there's no room at the end? No room at the end, John. As much as I love you and the pod, we actually have no room at the end. We're excited. I mean, it's been a ton of work.

9:42And, you know, Peter Lazarus and the entire ad sales sports team has done a great job. Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and NBA All-Star Weekend are all sold out and sold out in a time period that allows us to make sure we're strategic. Now is the fun part of getting creative approved and everything else that happens. So it's nice to have it done at this point so we can start to work on all of the nuances that come between here and there. So give me a sense of what the market was like coming in. You came out big in what we call the upfront selling season. That's in the spring when you try to sell everything early on.

10:22And it sounds like that went really well. People that waited for the later market, what's known as a scatter market, must have gotten shut out about pretty more so than they thought. Yeah, well, they got to pay a different unit rate, which was still a great value for to be able to reach 120 million people. But, you know, these games will have a handful of units that will have been sold for 10 plus million dollars. And that has not happened before in the past. So it has been an extremely strong marketplace as it relates to not only the Super Bowl, but also the Olympics. So we feel good. And, you know, when you look at it, the top categories, you know, Tech will be the biggest category, CPG, pharma, but it's also different advertisers.

11:11If we go back to 2022 to this year's game, over half the advertisers are new advertisers, and about 40 % of the advertisers are new from last year when it was on Fox. So there's been a bit of a turnover with that. And there's also, thankfully, Paris delivered above expectations for what we had there. So we had strength as it related to the Olympics as well. But I think the marketplace was appreciative of how we went early. We gave opportunities for people to package Super Bowl and Olympics all together to do sponsorships to drive their opportunities further. So I think the marketplace was appreciative of how we went to the marketplace.

11:56How many advertisers are doing that, both in the Super Bowl and in the Winter Olympics? We'll have about 40 % of the advertisers will be in both. All right. A much smaller number than where we had been. Let's stick with the Winter Olympics because I find that to be such a more intriguing story. When you say sold out, what does that mean? Does that just mean the primetime show or does that mean everything on linear TV? Everything on linear TV is sold out. Now, in the digital world, based on impressions and tracking, we have programmatic deals that will fire if we have impressions that are there.

12:37But linear sold out and all the scheduled digital that we have as of this point is all sold out as well. So, I mean, I think if you go back and part of the early question was, why did we do this? We also there was a trend where the big sponsorship deals were just not going to be big enough to support the revenue needed. You need to go out and find new advertisers. So if you will have more new advertisers in this year's Winter Olympics than we had total advertisers in 2018. So it's just been a shift to find more advertisers and smaller advertisers and new categories to drive that. Now, how is that possible?

13:20I don't want to sound naive here, but more new advertisers than total advertisers. Obviously, it's a factor of having more spots to sell, I would think. Well, it's smaller deal sizes, but you also have the benefit of having cable and digital. You go back to 18, and we had less hours, number one, and a lot of it was on broadcast only. Now we're using cable. Now we're using streaming. So we have more impressions to sell. And we also have smaller packages. Not every advertiser can afford a million-dollar unit cost in primetime, but a lot of them can afford a$250 ,000 digital schedule. So we've had new advertisers come in through that door.

14:05I should know this, but how many Super Bowls have you sold? This will be – I started in 2014. So this will be 14, 18, 20. Four. Those would be fifth. What's unique about this Super Bowl selling process?

14:31I think it really was kind of what you nailed earlier, which was we did it in a different way. We moved it earlier. We started conversations. And we haven't really talked about the World Cup. The World Cup, just how you go to market with FIFA. That's a lot of big events for you, by the way. This little event that's going to be in America called the World Cup is coming up on Telemundo as well. Yeah, it is. I feel bad like for poor World Cup, like it just isn't getting enough credit. But we get through February. But it's it's been a you know, it's been a success of that. That's about 90 percent sold out.

15:09But we started the process very early on that, which allowed us to start having conversations with everyone earlier than they had in the past. a little earlier than some would have wanted. But at the same time, I think everyone, we did it in a manner which gave everyone time to make decisions and decide what they wanted to do. Mark, let me take a quick break. I want to come back and I just want to talk about sort of the state of the market as you see it.

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16:43Mark, I have another basic question for you here, but I've been covering this stuff from the dot-com Super Bowl. I forgot, puppies.com. What was the big Super Bowl ad that they had in there? And I just remember that ad sales, TV ad sales, particularly around sports and big events, really, to me, in several years, were like a barometer of the economy. So you saw that there was going to be the dot-com bubble that was bursting back in 2000, 2001. The downturn in 2008, you started hearing from ad sales people and TV, things are starting to get pretty soft on this. Number one, am I correct in saying that?

17:32And number two, it would seem like the economy is doing doing great guns based on on your ad sales performance for the for the spring or for the late winter coming up. Yeah, you're right. And we spend a lot of time working on the economics of the marketplace and trying to determine category by category where we see the strength will be. But you're right. Sports always has been a bit of a barometer. And, you know, when I was at Turner Sports and we went through the ninety nine downturn, we've had a couple of soft periods here and there. sports, I think just because of the big ticket price tag, often is the first one that you start to see the cracks in the economy.

18:13And we just haven't, you know, for, there was probably two years ago, I think the really the influx of pharma money propped up the industry probably disproportionately. But over the past 24 months, we've really seen a change where you're in in In 2025, we had growth in every single category that we tracked. There's 13 categories and all 13 categories grew in ad sales spent. And I've never seen that in my career. And I think also sports has benefited from different categories coming in. I mentioned pharma. But if you go back 15 years ago, you would never have had retail as a big category in sports.

19:01you know you would have maybe a couple spots a game from a target or a walmart but now you watch an nf get nfl game and there's so much retail that is in there so it's kind of buoyed the entire marketplace overall but we spend a ton of time on that and you know and it's also interesting when you look at the difference of different sports like for i mentioned the categories for super Bowl, but Olympics, that's pharma, auto, financial, tech, and travel. And travel's always big with the Olympics because, let's be honest, most Americans are not going to get to go to Paris or Milan. This is their chance to experience these cities and, you know, have Mike Tirico tell them about it.

19:43And so you see different categories of different personalities based on sports. and you know thankfully we have Molly Solomon who I think is a genius you know who produces our Winter Olympics you know I'll tell you how smart I am Molly has won I don't know I think the exact number is like a billion Emmys so Molly before Paris I know I'm thinking about this idea of changing what we do with Snoop and I was like Molly that is a terrible idea I was like His show with Kevin Hart is so great. I was like, why would you mess with that? And I still have zero Emmys, and she won more Emmys based on what she did with Snoop in Paris.

20:27So there's a reason I do what I do and what Molly does. But it's unbelievable to have partners like that that help us tell these stories. That's so funny. That's why I hate reviewing telecasts or shows because I'm like, my personal viewpoint, I know nothing. basically other than what I like and what I don't like. Right. You said you, go ahead. No, go ahead. You said that you have like 15 different categories. All of them are up. What are the hottest ones? What are up the most right now? I mean, I'm going to, like, where is, when I think about sports, I think about sports betting and I think about all of the advertising around that, That seems to kind of come back down a little bit.

21:16It doesn't seem to be as robust as it was a couple of years ago. Yeah, I think that's still healthy, but it's absolutely leveled off. The biggest jump we've seen is technology. You've really seen and you'll see. What is technology? Well, it's a fair question of what falls in technology. That's, you know, everything from a Uber to a Google could fall in technology. So it's a pretty broad category. But you'll see an array of new advertisers in that category, specifically in the Super Bowl. But we started to see this last year of new brands coming into sports in a bigger way. And I mentioned Uber and Google.

22:00Those are two of the brands that are partners. You know, LA28 were partnered with Casey Wasserman in selling the sponsorships for that. and having brands like a Starbucks and Google and Uber, Delta, all of these big chip brands who are leaning into sports bigger than they ever had has buoyed the marketplace. One of the reasons I was so eager to get you on here is your background. is you started at Turner Sports working with Mark Lazarus there, I believe, right? And David Levy as well. And that's back when I was at a publication called Cable Fax, F-A-X, we used to fax. It was talk about a technology marvel.

22:50We used to fax it to people and they would get it that day. Like it was amazing. And we both observed, and you lived it, the growth of cable to where it was going to take over broadcast at one point. Now we're at the same sort of inflection point. It feels like with, with streaming and, and you're of course selling Peacock as, as, as you reference as well. Does it feel the same? Is it, how does it feel for you as somebody that, that, that went through the growth of cable that is now jumping on the, the streaming bandwagon bandwagon, like it's not a real business, the streaming business? It's a great question.

23:35And it's funny because I love it. I can picture the same charts of where you would see cable is going to overtake broadcast viewing and there would be the death of broadcast and cable was going to be the champion. It's the exact same things that happen right now with streaming and broadcast and cable. And for us, the decision we made, which is we don't want to focus only on one thing, that we think there's a huge value to an advertiser, that you need to be in linear, you need to be in cable, you need to be in streaming. And as much as that's written about streaming, and there is no doubt it's growing in its importance, but 72 % of the ad impressions are still on linear television.

24:20And so sometimes we need to take a step back in terms of like the rhetoric around it. So if you're a marketer and you're only using streaming, you're missing a huge part of the population that is not just watching streaming. So, you know, we developed a platform which is called One Platform a couple of years ago in order to make an advertiser with one by developed by entertainment, sports, news, cross linear, digital, cable streaming in Spanish and English all at once. Part of the challenge in the past was it was always segregated into separate segments. So the whole part of it, which I agree with you, this feels like a repeat of the same thing.

25:01But at the same time, I think you need a bit of everything in there. And you mentioned Peacock. And I think Peacock, you know, I think this is probably me growing up as an only child. Like, I feel like poor Peacock never gets the credit it deserves. It's unbelievable. Like, it's five years old. We have 100 million monthly active users. It has virtually every major sport on it. It just won a Critics Choice Award for all her fault. Like it's killing it. And it is so dismissed in the marketplace. I feel bad. If Peacock was a human, I would hug it because it has never gotten the problem. And it's so terrible.

25:42Part of it is my job to give it the credit. But we're so proud of what it is. And we just let the rhetoric around it just go. That's great. You have to adopt it, Mark. Yeah. So, all right. I want to take a role of a well-heeled advertiser. And if you're selling me broadcast, which is like, you know, a dumb ad, you're like, you're just kind of putting it in and I don't know who's watching it. You're giving me these numbers of people that are watching it. I don't know who it is. Or you referenced programmatic earlier. In digital, I know exactly who's watching it. Pretty soon, actually right now, you can start to target me to the people that I really want to see.

26:27It seems like such an easier sell to me to want to be a part of Peacock or that digital streaming universe. I love your questions. Great, because we just announced a couple of weeks ago what we're calling Performance Insight Hub, because you're exactly right. TV used to be just a blunt instrument. You would just go out and reach as many people as possible. The fact is now we can tell you based on your set-top box data, based on your streaming data, I can now tell you how your ad is performing at the top of the sales funnel and awareness, how it's doing in consideration, and what it's doing for search.

27:04So no longer is TV just dumb. TV is an unbelievably efficient tool to be able to reach a whole lot of people. So you've seen advertisers who have gone too heavily into the programmatic or one-to-one. And what happens is TV has a great bleed. It used to be called waste, but a great bleed that you're reaching more than one person at a time with television. And so you are absolutely getting the benefit of that reach when you do linear. So really, we believe the perfect combination is broadcast cable and streaming because you'll be able to drive reach and efficiency and targeting all at once. And so that's what this new tool that we're out here at CES right now talking about advertisers with.