NBCUniversal Bets That the Super Bowl, Olympics and NBA Can Power It Through the Upfront
To say that NBCUniversal ad sales chairman Mark Marshall is bullish on what his company has to offer at this year's upfront is an understatement.
'The fact is that this will be the greatest single year of content that any single media company has ever had,' Marshall says confidently, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter.
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He has a case to make.
The NBA on NBC will return to the network's lineup later this year, and in early 2026, NBC will have the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl and NBA playoffs almost back to back to back.
Marshall frames this year's upfront as being the culmination of years of work, both in terms of the company's product stack, and its programming output.
'To be able to have it with Peacock as a mature product, our data products and targeting as mature products, this is what we've been working toward,' Marshall says. 'I mean, we've had the 2026 upfront circled for four years, building everything.'
Of course, that doesn't mean it will be a typical upfront. Tariffs and recession fears continue to weigh on the media business, and while there haven't been serious impacts yet, Marshall is not concerned.
'Going back to COVID in 2020, we've had five years of uncertainty, whether it was supply chain or tariffs. The fact is unemployment remains low, the economy is in a great spot, there is a debate around interest rates, but we don't think it changes materially how we run the upfront, because we have kind of gone through this the past five years,' Marshall says. 'No doubt that tariffs are an uncertainty. From a marketer's standpoint, they are trying to be more nimble about what kind of creative they put out. We saw it measuring what happened when we went through 2020, the advertisers that stayed on, their stocks did 80 percent better over that period of time.'
Marshall says that the company is planning for marketers to want more flexibility to move things around, but that he believes what they are selling should still generate a robust response during the upfront. Both NBC and Telemundo will have a substantial portion of their daily lineups be live, and that marketers are responding by moving 'back to broadcast.'
'For some marketers that moved away from it, they've come back because of that idea of wanting live, wanting resources, because what happens is that live drives your social conversation, and they're trying to jump on top of that event,' Marshall says. 'It's hard to build a social conversation for a streamer that everyone might watch at a different time. So it's just a different strategy.'
And he hopes that the May 12 upfront, which kicks off the busy week, can create another buzzy moment that buyers remember as the upfronts drag on, just as NBCU did last year when it debuted its trailer for Wicked at the confab.
'That was something that was not what we were doing years ago. It was cool. It was very cool,' Marshall says, adding that How To Train Your Dragon and the upcoming theme park opening for Epic Universe could come into play.
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