Sports Advertising Trends 2026: Streaming Growth, NFL, NBA, and Olympics Insights

Kelly and Sean break down how advertising is evolving across major sports—from the Olympics to the NFL and NBA—and why streaming continues to reshape how brands reach audiences. 

In this episode, Kelly and Sean take a closer look at how advertising is shifting across the sports landscape in early 2026, using recent data and real-world examples to unpack what’s changing and why. 

They begin with a lighter moment on sports viewing habits before moving into a structured breakdown of major events and leagues, including the Olympics, NFL, NBA, and NHL. From there, the conversation focuses on one consistent theme: streaming is expanding quickly, while traditional TV remains steady but slower-growing. 

The Olympics serve as a strong example, with streaming now accounting for a significantly larger share of ad revenue compared to prior years. At the same time, linear TV still plays a meaningful role, showing that audience behavior is evolving rather than fully shifting. 

Kelly and Sean also discuss how advertisers are adapting their buying strategies. One standout approach is multi-sport programmatic buying, where brands target audiences across a range of sports content instead of focusing on a single league. This method offers flexibility and efficiency while still capturing engaged viewers. 

The episode closes with a look at which industries are increasing investment in sports—such as tech and pharma—and which are showing more caution, along with a brief outlook on what upcoming global events may mean for the market.  

Key Topics Covered 

•  How sports remains one of the strongest areas for live viewing 
•  Growth in streaming vs traditional TV across major events 
•  Olympics advertising trends and shifting viewer behavior 
•  NFL, NBA, and NHL ad performance insights 
•  The rise of multi-sport programmatic buying 
•  Why streaming bundles are becoming more common 
•  Category trends: tech, pharma, retail, and auto 
•  What to expect heading into the World Cup

 Want deeper insights into sports and advertising trends? Reach out at press@guideline.ai

 to learn more. 

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Advertising is not just about the economy overall. It's trying to figure out where things are going with the economy, with that ed industry, and getting there before the headlines catch up.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Every week, billions of dollars move across media platforms, quietly shaping what we see, what we're buying, and which businesses are winning or losing.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

But a lot of the times, that signal is buried deep within the data, and it requires going in, pulling it out, and trying to figure out where the market is headed.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

That is what Media Monitor is all about. Making sense of those shifts that are shaping advertising, media, and consumer behavior using real data, not guesswork.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Every episode, we're going to break down what's happening in the market. We're going to see what has happened, why it's happened, and ultimately what it matters for brands, advertisers, publishers, and figuring out where things are going.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Sometimes we're going to go deep into the numbers. Sometimes Sean and I are going to react to the news. And sometimes we're going to try to predict what's coming next.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

But it's always going to be the same. We're always going to be reducing uncertainty and trying to make people, you, make smarter decisions about today and tomorrow.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

So if you work in media marketing or advertising, or you simply want to understand how the industry works behind the scenes, then this show, totally for you. This is Media Monitor Powered by Guidelines.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Well, Sean, I have to admit something.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Okay. Usually I want to say when you when you go that route, you don't do it in a recorded format that then can go out to all of our listeners as well. But sure, go ahead. Well I'm all ears. Uh when you and all of the listeners.

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Yeah, and all of the 300 people.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't be spreading our business. Growing at uh leaves and browns, by the way. I just want to point it out for anyone listening out there.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

Well, Sean, when you told me that this week we were going to talk sports, I felt like I had to confess that last weekend I caved and I allowed my almost 14-month-old son to watch WrestleMania with my husband.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

That is that's early. That's early.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

I know, but I just we have this rule, and I think I don't know, it's debatable. I'm limiting screen time, but sports, I think, is a different category. We don't do a lot of it. He may have seen a couple minutes of the NFL draft last night. A lot of surprises, a lot of shakeups, a lot of Ohio State. But yeah, I let him do it, and I have to say, he loved it. He was like flinging himself off the couch and responsibly, of course. No injuries.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Sure. For now.

SPEAKER_02 2:52

For now, I know. So I just I had to put that in our little confessional this week.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Yeah. I I can also relate. I growing up in the era of Hulk Hogan, Macho Man was like my first taste of wrestling. I loved it. And so I recently showed my kids who are six and four, uh, a clip of Macho Man Randy Savage. And they're like, Well, who is that guy? Why is he making weird noises? Like, oh, he's a wrestler. And like, well, what's wrestling? And so I I showed them a match with Macho Man, and within probably six seconds, my youngest comes running across the bed and dropkicked my oldest directly into the chest and just screamed, wrestling. And that's where I realized as a parenting decision in that moment, I was like, 100% on me. This is entirely my fault. There's there's there's there's no excuse. My wife came in because everyone was crying, not me, my kids, but crying because they one got hurt and then the other one was sad that they did hurt the other one. And I just explained that. I was like, Yeah, I had them watch Mantra Man, and my wife just walked out. So I knew at that moment that it was not the best parenting decision. We have since started to reintroduce wrestling responsibly. But uh yeah, I have I have a fondness in my heart. It was uh one of the very first projects that I worked on when I was at NBC Universal was actually like reinvigorating and getting people excited about wrestling. Um and so it's always near and dear to my heart, and I love it. So hopefully eventually we'll get it back into a rhythm where the kids can watch it and not want to fight each other.

SPEAKER_02 4:21

So then wrestle responsibly.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Just wrestle responsibly. Hey kids, don't try this at home. All of the disclaimers for all of you listeners out there, this is done by professionals.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

I mean, it makes good television, and so do all sports, really. I mean, we've had we had an incredible winter with the Olympics. So now that we're kind of through some of the the main events, we figured let's let's talk about it. So wanted to spend some time talking about trends in sports. We'll hit NFL, we'll hit NBA, a little NHL, and of course the Olympics, as I mentioned. Let's let's get into it, Sean. What are kind of top line? What are some of the trends that we're seeing for sports in early 2026?

SPEAKER_00 5:06

For sure, right? I think sports is one of those interesting things, right? Because it's the it's the like last bastion of linear TV, because people still want to consume it live. There's something exciting about it. So there's all this attention on sports, which is great. There's the drama of it, people just want to lean in and understand. So we'll start with Olympics, right? Because that's once in every four years we'll get to talk about it, especially because we'll be doing hundreds of episodes. So this will be the first time, but not last, we talk Olympics. Uh, but from a winter's game perspective, we compared it back to, you know, um going back from uh kind of last last time, um, it's up 56% in our data, which is a massive swing if you think about kind of the the difference of a couple of years, coming in around 800 billion. Now, we know for folks listening, right, one of the things that we want to caveat is our data is really good about paid media. So like the spots and dots, what's happening from a TV perspective, from a sponsorship sponsorship perspective, right? That's not necessarily something that we have line of sight into. So a lot of the numbers you'll hear about like 1.1, 1.4 billion in market, most of that is then like tied up in like sponsorship related, you know, revenue. So that's not something we have line of sight into. So we want a caveat to say 800 billion is really that paid media, but up again, 56%. I think that's all like well and good, right? It was it was an interesting, you know, um location, right? It's a little closer. Time zones matter. So like as you get closer to the time zone being live in prime time, it tends to do better for advertising. You know, people want to watch their sports live. So if it's closer to when people are actually watching TV, then you know you tend to see more ad revenue. Um and that's true kind of globally based on the time zones, right? Um when the games are in Asia, you know, you see Australia and New Zealand do better when the games are you know in the US Europe, right? You see our European and kind of North American markets pop. Um but overall, kind of the thing that I would just highlight is is interestingly, is you know, TV grew 31%, um, which is great, right? You don't really see those from a TV perspective, but streaming grew 74%, and it's now a third of all of the Olympics revenue. And from an ad perspective, which is a massive change. Because if you go back to the last go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

I was just gonna say, what was it the last time around? What percent?

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So so kind of last time was a kind of in the let me kind of pull up my stat here. I think it was 17, yeah, 17%. But you go back even to kind of two Olympics games before that in Pyonchang in South Korea, and total streaming was around 9%. So it's gone from 9 to 17 and almost doubled kind of every single Olympics, winter Olympics, and it's now at around 31.5%. So like just this like hockey stick growth in terms of streaming. But again, what's interesting is it's not cannibalizing because every single time period, we've also seen corresponding linear growth. So it's not kind of a one-for-one of like, okay, it's moving off of TV. I'm watching it streaming. No, people are watching stuff differently. I mean, we can I could kind of talk to that too. Is like in a lot of what we consumed were like a lot of the trial games on streaming, because you could kind of like watch anything you wanted. So like a lot of our Olympic streaming was like, yeah, I would love to just watch, you know, women's skeleton for 20 minutes uh on just the trials, like the time trials. Like it was interesting. It had nothing to do with the thing. Yeah, in an earlier episode, too.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Yeah, that there's there's so much more content now. If you wanted to just watch them like sitting around, you could. Which uh is is very different than it used to be when you know back back in the day. Wow. Okay, so big shift towards streaming. Anything else that you wanted to call out on the Olympics? What jumped out?

SPEAKER_00 8:44

No, I mean, um, you know, I think overall just incredible growth there. Um I think maybe kind of pivoting a little bit kind of because you know, the Super Bowl essentially was, you know, right there with uh kind of the opening ceremonies, so like hand in hand. But the NFL overall incredibly strong growth for the the quarter as well. Again, kind of focused really on playoffs as well as um you know the the Super Bowl itself, um kind of within that context. You're back. I'm back. I know.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

So pivoting a little.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Yep. Uh real quick, uh Sekir, if you're listening, lost internet connection there, so we're gonna pivot, and this is gonna be so just cut out that last kind of break.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

You can just start with pivoting a little.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Oh yeah. So pivoting a little bit, going from the Olympics. I think because Super Bowl, Olympics kind of start at the exact same time, I think maybe talking the NFL's playoff season plus Super Bowl probably makes the next sense. Also incredibly strong growth there. Overall, the league grew about 10% ad revenue in Q1, which is really healthy. Um TV still kind of plugging away. I think a lot of that is like CPM increases. But interestingly, streaming was up 43%. Um so again, doing doing really well there. I think kind of the key theme through most of this is gonna be TV's doing well, streaming is doing fantastic is gonna be kind of the through line of every stat that I say.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

And that's kind of the conversation that we're having in our house now. Like I need a guide. I need like an old school TV guide, not to tell me what's on the channels, but to tell me where I can watch things because it's you know, you know, Netflix has it, or you know, we're we're we're moving around. I I can't keep track of it, quite frankly.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yeah. I mean, we we talked about this uh slightly different, but if if you just wanted to watch the NFL right now, um between all of the services that you would need to subscribe to, you'd basically be all in at about 110 bucks for streaming. Cable starts at about 120. So like I could just go back to old school cable and watch all of the NFL. Um or I would have to remember, like, oh, who does the Sunday night? Okay, so the up, you have the eight o'clock game, I gotta go peek out. Okay, I gotta log out, okay, Monday night football, I got to go somewhere else, right? Um Thursday night, I hope I have Amazon, right? It's like these you're jumping around versus old school cable, it's like, hey, I'm turning on NBC, I'm turning on, I can kind of toggle real quick between four channels. I don't need to log in and log out, different streaming services. So it is, yeah, it's a massive, but again, it's doing well, right? Streaming is up uh for the NFL. And similarly, the NBA, which I think is like the real interesting use case, because like the NF NBA went from essentially no streaming to streaming everywhere, right? And when they did their whole rights negotiations, they went very hard digitally. And so no surprise there that we're seeing 109% growth kind of for the NBA and Q1 on streaming specifically. Um and so again, there's like I I would call out to say, like, yeah, it's kind of like unfair right now to look at the NBA because it's just they didn't have it, they have it. But kind of curious to see where that goes, right, in terms of of next year. And then kind of probably from a lesser extent, not that like we're in you know playoff playoffs. We'll see from the NBA NHL like where they actually finished the season, because they're kind of right in the middle of it. But the NHL uh kind of a weird comp, they paused because of the Winter Olympics, right? A lot of their athletes were like, hey, peace out, I'm gonna go compete for my country. And so, you know, basically flat for the quarter, which again, not bad given kind of the weird schedule that they had. Um so overall, like I think from a professional league perspective, I think it's fair to say incredible growth for Q1, even with kind of the the World Cup there, uh not World Cup, sorry, uh Olympics, uh kind of taking some of those sports dollars away. It was very much like a both end situation and kind of a a rising tide raised all ships when it came to sports in Q1.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Yeah, I mean, good thing that we paused on NHL because took the gold.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

Right?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Big W. Well, let's not, you know, knock because we do have uh a decent amount of of Canadian listeners as well. So um, you know, do you want to shout out good game, good game, you know, silver's respectable.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Exactly. So with all of this shifting towards streaming, is it changing how people are buying um or what they're buying, how they're buying? Talk to me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yeah, it's a good, good softball question into our data. One of the things that I think is is I'm gonna say cool, right? I've caveated before on different shows. What I think is cool, maybe not everyone else does. But one very different way that that some folks buy digitally is multi-sports. So it's this kind of bundle where you kind of, hey, I'm gonna buy sports, live sports, but it's a combination of a lot of different sports on streaming. And it's done digitally because you can say, I just want sports and I want to target these audiences. Find me anything that meets those criteria within the ad inventory. It's a huge portion of our of our ad spend in terms of what we can see. And there's there's strategic reasons behind it, right? With the exception of the big marquee type leagues, there's a lot of sports coverage as well as sports consumption that kind of is shared among folks that are like sports leaning, that maybe like they're a diehard fan of a particular team, but year-round, they are consuming live sports because it's just fun to watch, right? In those instances, sometimes it's just enough to find those folks wherever they're watching and whatever they're watching. So the multi-sport option makes a lot of sense when you go and digitally. It's very popular that you can buy it programmatically in these bundles. But part of the strategy is you can kind of mix out what's in the bundle so that from like a maybe a more premier sport league, could be anything from the NCAA to the NBA, HL, you know, uh English Premier League, right? Maybe some of those games are in there. But so too is the sports that you might see on like not the ESPN Ocho kind of example, but maybe like ESPN two or ESPN three, where it's like, you know, women's rec league uh softball championships or men's lacrosse, right? Like that's one that does show up where it's not going to be a huge driver, but you might, if you're just looking for something to turn on, it's there. But the benefit is for advertisers, it's usually like half of the cost of like buying a straight up league. Yeah. And so if you're like, if you just want to get in and kind of just ease in, right, it's a great way to buy in and and that is helping. But the call out here is that just for Q1 alone, there was $500 million booked against this multi-sport option. And like annually, it's about $2 billion in terms of what we can see. So this is not chump change in terms of like how it's being bought and sold. Yeah. And the reason why we call multi-sports is a lot of times we can't necessarily see what of the bundle is going where, we just know that a bundle was purchased. Um, but it's it's a big business and it's up 50% since last year.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

And honestly, I wouldn't sleep on it because I while you know we're getting so used to being able to put on exactly what we want when we want it, there's still an appetite for passive viewing without making all these decisions. I can't tell you how many times women's field hockey from a Northeast college has been on our TV because that's just what came on after whatever we were watching. And then like we've gotten into it. I've been watching there's uh a network, I think it's called like the Riz Network or something like that. It's very funny. It's really funny. But it will play like local high school college games.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

It's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

We I in college, I loved local access TV. Like it when in the college, it would literally you turn on it was like channel 33, and it was all like local stuff. It was like just fascinating to watch. It was great. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean 100%.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

So I think it's a good bang for your buck. I think people are, you know, they're they're paying attention.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's the thing, right? It's it's sports. So like you're definitely more leaned in than like a generic show that maybe you're also on your phone, right? Like maybe you're not lean as leaned in as like your favorite team is also playing, you know, and it's an NFL game. Sure, like you're you might be more leaned in, but like by its very nature, right? Because if you miss a play, that might be it for a lot of sports, right? Like certainly within the English Premier League, MLS, soccer, like you miss a goal, that might be the one one shot you get all the whole game. So people are more leaned into sports like that, where like there's low scoring, it's a big deal. So yeah, like it's it's certainly one to keep track of. Maybe as a as a takeaway, maybe the pitch is to tell all of the streamers that they should just have an ongoing channel that you can flip to. You don't pick the show, it's just live sports, and to your point, on like sometimes you just need something on. But yeah, overall sports still doing very well in our data is the the c takeaway here.

SPEAKER_02 17:16

Yeah. Um I know I feel like we need that for like and we kind of have it, but for all those reality TV junkies, we just need something that's feeding you all the reunions, all of the series across networks, right? Sure. But I digress. So before we kind of call the time here, trying to come up with a sports reference and I didn't do it.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

Let's talk about the category. Who's advertising in sports? Who are some of the winners and and and losers to say from a sports perspective? But I'll say gainers, decliners, yeah, like who's spending?

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yeah, um, I would say tech surged huge in Q1, really tied to a lot of those like Super Bowl ads, if you saw with like um, you know, generative AI, uh, and so like software in particular pushed hard in Q1, which I think drove up the whole category, but they're up, you know, 43% kind of thing. A bit more uh kind of muted, but also interesting was pharma was up 21% overall. And again, these percentages are somewhat tied to the 10 poles, but it's also interesting because pharma had historically not been an investor in live sports. So seeing them kind of like shift strategies is interesting to see where they're going next. I would just call it out to say, like, yeah, actually this is this is interesting, right? They're definitely moving money into live sports. They had historically shied away. Again, some of that's tied to the GLP one type type thing, because those are very much like consumer-facing, readily explainable solves uh an issue that a lot of folks have. So like kind of a no-brainer.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Well, and then also like you see Charles Barclay's jacket just getting progressively bigger and bigger as he's commentating, right? Like there's a little bit of a tie-in. There is.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

So for sure. For sure. It's it's all of that, right? And then, you know, that's kind of on the top end. I would say retail came in a little soft, was down eight percent for for the quarter. I think that's tied, you know, we saw kind of uh a material of softness coming out of Q4. I think that's just like a category that's in retreat. Auto, interestingly enough, was was up six percent. So, like, all told, if we think about all of the 10 poles, you might as well like consider that flat, um, which again is also a slightly different narrative because they are pulling back ad spend elsewhere. So again, this is like a positive story in the sense that like compared to their own spend, they're definitely pulling a hit on sports. Uh but yes, some softness there.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

Aaron Powell Cause I was gonna say the narrative on autos right now is it's it overall declining from an ad spend perspective. It's closed. So this is the one area where we're seeing some growth.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Exactly. Yeah. And again, maybe it's not like massive gains, but like six percent off of a decline is is still a positive and a win for sure. Uh yeah. So overall I would say very positive, right? You don't you don't get to double digit growth across the board without every category kind of investing up. So like overall, pretty, pretty healthy in terms of our of our ad spend. Again, call-outs of like retail auto being a little soft. It was a good quarter. Good quarter for sports, good quarter for the categories that invested, and you know, we'll probably see more of that for this year. You know, back half of Q2, Q three in terms of of the World Cup is gonna be a big deal. And so there's a lot to look forward to, and maybe at some other point we'll come back and talk March madness just in terms of of how that did overall. But you know, solid quarter.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

Yeah, I for one looking forward to the World Cup. Pretty pretty excited.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

Yeah, yeah. I am I am it's like the one that and the Olympics, Winter Olympics specifically, are like the sporting events that I turn into uh or tune into, I should say. I don't turn into the World Cup, that'd be weird. Uh tune into.

SPEAKER_02 20:45

Wow. Well, I mean, we'll talk about it when we get there, but as always, Sean, thank you. This has been enlightening, and uh I'm f I'm glad I could kind of get that WrestleMania off my chest.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah, yeah. You know, just uh parenting is a learning thing. They learn, it is the kid learns, we learn. It's everybody's learning.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Every day.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Every day.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

All right, Sean. Well, I will see you next week.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Thank you so much. Talk soon. Bye.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

All right, Sean. That wraps up this episode of Medium Monitor.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Terrific. And if you found today's conversation really helpful, tune back next week because we will be delivering insights weekly.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

And you can always explore the data behind these discussions at guideline.ai.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on Media Monitor.