The 2026 FIFA World Cup, which kicks off next week, is one of many tentpole sports events drawing attention – and ad spend – to live sports streaming.
Cord-cutting isn’t the only motivator marketers have for throwing money at livestreamed sports, although spikes in streaming viewership is part of the reason.
As an industry, “we’ve been talking about the shift to streaming for quite some time,” said Mohammad Chughtai, global VP of strategy and partnerships at programmatic media platform MiQ. “Now, what we’re talking about is more about maximizing the investment as much as possible.” (Performance TV, anyone?)
To squeeze the most juice out of their live sports campaigns, Chughtai said many marketers are adopting programmatic buying and marketing mix modeling (MMM), both of which are also drawing more advertisers to the digital live sports cornucopia.
The 2026 upfront season is just one testament to the growing importance of live sports to marketers, Chughtai said. MiQ helps media buyers secure live sports inventory through private marketplace (PMP) deals.
Live sports are also helping streamers defend their status as premium video, Chughtai said. This term has undergone change and controversy as user-generated content infiltrates the connected TV landscape.
I spoke with Chughtai about how marketers are applying their programmatic chops to live sports investments.
AdExchanger: What is setting the scene for more programmatic buying in the live sports arena?
MOHAMMAD CHUGHTAI: Live sports programming keeps shifting to streaming, and programmatic buying is a natural follow thanks to cost efficiency.
For marketers, one of the biggest pain points of linear TV has been static or rising costs to reach dwindling audiences. Meanwhile, in streaming, supply has massively outpaced demand, forcing streaming platforms to consistently lower the cost of their inventory to compete.
Programmatic introduces another layer of cost efficiency, an important part of proving a marketer’s investments garnered enough return on ad spend to justify further commitments. Overall, marketers are getting a good deal on connected TV, including YouTube.
Even in streaming environments, tentpole sports events reach massive audiences simultaneously, so it’s hard to picture the one-to-one targeting associated with programmatic. How ‘programmatic’ can live sports buying really get?
To answer that question, it’s important to separate targeting and measurement in programmatic parlance.
On the targeting side, the investments we see for live sports campaigns are much broader compared to your typical CTV buy these days. There may be some light targeting for live sports buys, such as region or basic audience demographics, but certainly not the performance marketing tactics we’re seeing become more popular in general streaming ad buys.
The measurement that buyers rely on to rationalize their live sports budgets is the area where we see more technical savviness. Even for an upper-funnel buy that’s meant to build branding, marketers still need to see if their ads performed against that metric of performance. More sophisticated attribution models, including marketing mix modeling (MMM), are making advanced measurement possible at scale for advertisers investing in live sports streaming.
I’ve been hearing about MMM becoming cool again for a while. How are you seeing it work within the context of live sports streaming?
MMM pairs well with the nature of livestreamed sports advertising, almost more than a typical CTV buy. Most MMM models are based on geolocation and time stamps, making them a natural fit for ad buys within live sports programming that is also largely based on location and timing.
But, historically, marketers would use their legacy MMM models with multiple years’ worth of data to get a read on measurement every three to six months. The process was sometimes akin to commissioning a mini consulting project, with someone on the other end piecing together recommendations based on user consumption across various channels.
We see some very large marketers today that still use this approach because it offers useful long-term insights about a brand and its audience. Other advertisers are turning to the next wave of MMM models, which give reporting on a much more rapid cadence.
What does this next wave of MMM look like? Is it more advanced than just slapping AI features onto something that already exists?
The infrastructure and business models of MMM are evolving. Now, more attribution models are open-source, allowing buyers to build custom models on top of an already-existing platform with established scale. Google’s Meridian is just one example of this model; at MiQ, we’ve built an in-house solution based on the Google Meridian model, and we can churn out weekly and sometimes daily measurement reports.
This trend also lowers the barrier of entry to smaller marketers who may be considering live sports campaigns but lack enough time and/or resources to build their own attribution models from the ground up. Plus, rapid reporting that covers a broad base allows media buyers to optimize campaigns much more quickly – including while they’re still in flight – which is a boon for ad performance.
What’s the most popular flavor of programmatic buying for live sports these days?
At MiQ, we are running most programmatic sports buys via private marketplace deals because buyers often find it to be more cost efficient. For example, PMPs can package together higher-cost inventory from premium publishers alongside lower-cost inventory from channel distributors, making for broad scale at a reasonable price.
Programmatic guaranteed buys are also a good option for media buyers who prioritize deal delivery because they need to guarantee a certain number of impressions. We don’t recommend buying live sports inventory via the open exchange.
Another trend I’m seeing is the growing need for sell-side targeting. When buyers apply targeting within a demand-side platform, they’re only seeing the cut of supply that their particular DSP(s) have access to.
As a buyer-facing company, why are you so bullish on sell-side targeting?
Sell-side targeting typically has better publisher data than a marketer can get from a DSP. Which is not only because of the proximity to the impression, but also because of how DSPs process the sheer volume of bid requests they receive. DSPs throw out a majority of the bids they receive. Although DSPs have systems in place to process the most relevant bid requests, those systems aren’t perfect, which is one reason why ad space can go unsold, resulting in a blank slate for viewers. Although DSPs represent very wide scale, setting up targeting on the sell side can help advertisers increase the odds that they’re reaching the most relevant audiences. Which leads to higher conversion rates and, of course, performance.
What do you think? Let me know your thoughts. Hit me up at alyssa@adexchanger.com.
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