The kickoff of the NFL‘s next season remains months away, but Madison Avenue can’t wait to play football.
Demand for commercial slots in regular-season NFL games as well as in NBC’s scheduled 2026 telecast of Super Bowl LX is heavy, according to three people familiar with the matter, with NBC seeing what is perhaps heavier-than-anticipated interest in Big Game ads priced at around $7 million for 30 seconds. The dynamics have surfaced in early negotiations tied to the industry’s annual “upfront” ad-sales market, when U.S. TV companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of new programming.
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The move toward sports takes place even though media companies ranging from Amazon to Paramount Global earlier this week wrapped big annual showcases aimed at highlighting new programs to advertisers. Many of them focused intently on sports, one of the few formats on TV that continues to command the large, simultaneous audiences that advertisers continue to crave. Amazon, NBCUniversal and Disney are all eager to hook sponsors on new NBA schedules they have secured as part of new 11-yeasr deals with the basketball league. Netflix, meanwhile, took pains to discuss new NFL games it will show on Christmas Day.
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The rush for football time takes place in what is believed to be a tricky market. Some media buyers believe the volume of ad commitments for this year’s haggle may be lower than in 2024, and these executives, who negotiate on behalf of multiple advertisers, say there is already a debate about streaming ads that could keep the overall market from moving to a boil from its current simmer.
The solid interest in football, and, to a lesser degree, in other live sports, shows how TV’s advertising market is fragmenting just like its overall audience. In years past, TV networks didn’t have to contend with vastly different market dynamics for specific types of commercial inventory. Now, executives say, they have what is seen as a hot market for sports, a shrinking market for linear TV that has more demand than supply, and a growing market for TV that has some advertisers taking a wait-and-see approach.
The 2025 “upfront” market has already had several ups and downs. Concern about tariffs being put in place by the Trump administration has cooled sentiment around buying TV time. Yet recent surges in the stock market have fueled new hope that advertisers may feel a growing need to spend.
Executives on both sides of the negotiating table say advertisers are pressing for continued “rollbacks” in the rates they pay for ads that run on streaming services. Thanks to the entrance of Netflix and Amazon into the market in recent years, there is a glut of streaming inventory, which has driven down what is known in the industry as CPMs, or the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers. The measure is a critical one in these annual talks between the TV networks and Madison Avenue.
Last year, CPMs fell to $43.35 for broadcast and $20.60 for cable, according to Media Dynamics Inc., a tracker of the market, marking declines of 5.6% and 6.8%, respectively. Meanwhile, the average CPM for a 30-second ad tied to streaming fell by 16.7% — a dynamic that offset TV companies’ efforts to snare more advertising revenue.
Sellers have indicated they do not see the need to “rollback” CPM rates for streaming this year, hoping they can eke out some gains of a few percentage points and regain old ground, according to people familiar with current talks. But media buyers and advertisers may not feel pressure to move, citing the heightened supply of inventory, coupled with the fact that streaming ad time can be purchased without overwhelming pressure in the so-called “scatter” market, when commercials are purchased much closer to air date.
Sellers are much more sanguine about traditional TV ad time. Even though audiences are smaller for traditional TV, these executives said, there is still more demand for what impressions there are. This market dynamic emerges as more TV networking are loading up on sports, live spectacles, and award shows that tend to be viewed when they happen, not at moments of the audience’s own choosing. Buying and selling executives say they expect CPMs for linear cable and broadcast to increase in the low-to-mid-single-digit percentage range, while CPMs for sports could rise in the high-single-digit-percentage range.
NBCU may stand to benefit from whatever interest there is in playing ball. The company has a massive amount of sports inventory to sell, including not only time in “Sunday Night Football” and the 2026 Super Bowl, but spots tied to its new NBA schedule, the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup tournament slated to air on the company’s Telemundo Spanish-language network.
Ad commitments last year for primetime broadcast TV fell 3.5% in the upfront market, to $9.34 billion, according to Media Dynamics Inc., while commitments for primetime on cable tumbled 4.8%, to $9.065 billion. Meanwhile, ad commitments to streaming video hubs rose a noticeable 35.3%, hiking to $11.1 billion from $8.2 billion in the previous market. The amount committed to streaming video was greater than that devoted to primetime broadcast or primetime cable — a first for the industry.