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Mark Marshall is in Las Vegas to unveil a suite of new products, and tout a jam-packed lineup of tentpole events coming to NBCU’s properties next year.
By Alex Weprin
Media & Business Writer
2025 has only just started, but NBCUniversal‘s chairman of advertising sales Mark Marshall is already thinking about 2026.
It’s easy to understand why. 2026 is the 100th anniversary of NBC, and next year the network will have the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics. It will have the NBA and NBA All-Star Game, it will have the FIFA World Cup on Telemundo, the Ryder Cup golf tournament, the WNBA Finals, the Big 10 championship, and BravoCon.
That’s a lot of tentpole events in a short period of time, and Marshall says that marketers are already talking to NBCU about how they can buy in.
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“It is crazy to think NBC has been around for 100 years in 2026, and it will happen to be the biggest year in the history of not only NBCU, but any media company, to have all of those events happening in one place,” Marshall says, listing off the barrage of events on tap. “I think a lot of marketers are having earlier conversations with us, just because they are trying to think about where and how they plug into all these different events.”
“There is something that’s still really important to marketers of just that instantaneous reach,” Marshall says of the tentpoles on tap. “So you know, whether it’s the Today show or the Tonight Show or SNL, or even something like The Voice, all of those are really sought after from the market throughout the year. And then the big tentpoles are where a lot of advertisers want to launch creative or have specific elements with that.”
Indeed, NBC will use the NFL and the Olympics to help launch the NBA, as well as some new entertainment programming next year.
Marshall and his team are on the ground in Las Vegas this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, which has become a major advertising event.
NBCU’s announcements will include new Peacock ad products, an AI-driven product meant to improve efficiency, and a product meant to connect ad creative with content that shares a similar emotional tone.
At Peacock, live sports has become a backbone of the service, and the ad sales team is trying to bring some of its functionality to that programming. In addition to an “always on” product that streams live events when the app opens, NBCU will bring pause ads to live events. The “live in browse” feature will also be opened to sponsors, though the specifics of what that looks like remains to be determined.
“When we look at the usage of people on Peacock, live events have been where people are already pausing the most, and we didn’t have that technology ready yet, but now we do,” Marshall says, adding that the pause ad on on-demand programming drove a +43 percent lift in site visitation for brands and +43 percent higher memorability. “So now to be able to take it from entertainment programming where people have liked it and used it to live sports, where there’s the most [pausing by consumers], we think there’s a huge opportunity with that. So marketers have already started to line up around wanting to get into this, especially with the big tentpole events upcoming.”
Likewise, the AI-driven ad products and “emotional metadata” product are about improving efficiency for marketers that have grown accustomed to having more targeting and control in other video and social platforms.
“Audience targeting is becoming a little bit of table stakes, we think this next evolution of being able to layer on creative decisioning as well is going to make ads work even that much harder,” Marshall says. “So it’s a combination of what our secret sauce is, which is that great content. Marketers are spending $5 million to create a 30 second spot. If we can make that ad work harder by placing it — based on the creative tonality of that ad — against their KPIs, and drop it into the right target, the early beta testing we’re seeing is going to be off the charts for marketers.”
Comcast also announced its new “Universal Ads” platform Monday, with NBCU on board as a launch partner alongside Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, AMC Networks, and A+E Networks.
“The north star of advertising has always been combining the premium reach of linear with the precision of data-informed targeting for marketers,” Marshall says. “Now with Universal Ads, we are delivering that vision to businesses of all sizes. TV has always been a performance vehicle for brands, and UA puts the scaled reach and premium content that TV is known for into the hands of marketers everywhere.”
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