The news: Both the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Games and Super Bowl LX are less than a month away, and the World Cup will begin in the summer, teeing up a year flush with sports ad spending. NBCUniversal, the broadcaster for both events, has already sold out ad space for the winter Olympics, which will be the most lucrative in history. NBCU previously sold out Super Bowl LX inventory in September.

The company will also broadcast the NBA All-Star game on February 15.

Cyclical events like the Olympics and the shift to digital viewing channels are driving overall ad spending this year; Dentsu forecast that global ad spend will surpass $1 trillion for the first time in 2026.

How we got here: The kickoff of the 2026 mainstream sports season comes on the tail of a historic holiday season.

• Netflix’s Christmas day NFL broadcast became the most-streamed NFL game in history, with an average of 27.5 million viewers, per Netflix and Nielsen.
• Amazon broke records with its Black Friday NBA and NFL broadcasts.
• And the regular NFL season drove record ratings for CBS, Fox, and NBCU.

Zooming out: Sports have long been a fixture of the advertising landscape, but the shift to digital viewing means advertisers now have access to a wider array of ad formats and more in-depth analytics.

A 2025 EDO study found that NFL ads were 66% more effective on streaming than on cable and broadcast. With core viewership steadily swapping to primarily digital channels—streaming accounts for 45% of ad-supported TV viewing time, far more than cable or broadcast, per Nielsen—advertisers are spending heavily to follow audiences.

That dynamic has, in turn, led to a 20% increase in the value of sports rights deals, per an Ampere Analysis estimate. Companies like Amazon and NBCU are pursuing year-round sports strategies, scooping up streaming rights to attract advertisers beyond tentpole events like the Super Bowl.

Implications for advertisers: Digital viewing is now the default for sports. Streaming opens access to sports ad inventory, but high demand still makes it expensive to advertise against.

But that doesn’t mean sports are hands-off for those with more conservative budgets: Tentpole events spill over into other media channels, and platforms like TikTok and Snap offer opportunities to tap into the zeitgeist around sports events at much lower cost.