The action in Milano Cortina 2026 wasn’t limited to the slopes.
NBCU used this year’s Olympic Winter Games to lean further into programmatic buying for live sports at scale.
At the Paris Olympics in 2024, which was almost like a practice run, programmatic buying was only available through The Trade Desk. This year, NBCU worked with seven buy-side platforms: TTD again, Google’s DV360, FreeWheel’s Buyer Cloud (formerly Beeswax), Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP, StackAdapt and Viant.
NBCU also made Olympics inventory available through Comcast’s Universal Ads self-serve platform for the first time and used AI for creative review and campaign optimization in near real time.
These upgrades helped create a better livestreaming experience for both advertisers and viewers, Ryan McConville, NBCU’s chief product officer and EVP of ad products and solutions, told AdExchanger.
As a result, live sports is becoming “more digitized than ever before,” he added.
According to NBCU, 200 net-new brands that had never advertised during the Olympics before bought programmatically during this year’s games.
Are we exclusive?
But a surge of demand often brings its own set of challenges.
Livestreaming – especially live sports streaming – is its own beast with specific nuances. For example, brands are willing to pay millions for category exclusivity.
Large brands can be especially strict about their expectations of exclusivity, especially during major cultural moments like the Olympics. If an airline, for instance, is a title sponsor of the Games, separation from other airline ads may not be enough. That sponsor might even demand separation from any commercials that simply include an airplane in the creative, McConville said, regardless of whether the brand has anything to do with travel.
Connecting programmatic pipes to Olympics inventory meant that “we needed to put up guardrails to look at bids and make sure [ads] actually qualify,” McConville said, including a combination of AI and human oversight.
During last month’s Games, NBCU used AI to scan and preview roughly 6,000 ad creatives to determine whether they met brand safety, exclusivity and category protection expectations. The AI would assign a “confidence score” based on how well a given creative met all requirements, McConville said.
If an ad scored 100%, it would automatically be earmarked for delivery. Ads that didn’t get a perfect score, but also weren’t automatically rejected by the AI, would be classified as “questionable” and set aside for manual human review on an hourly basis throughout the Games.
Pace yourself
NBCU also used AI for pacing and optimization.
Pacing is a long-standing challenge for livestreaming. Viewership can fluctuate drastically during broadcasts, especially for a sporting event that takes place over the course of 17 days.
For Milano Cortina, NBCU used what it calls a “yield agent” to manage reach and frequency during traffic spikes to ensure that brands didn’t miss the chance to get in front of viewers – but without bombarding viewers either.
NBCU’s yield agent optimized as many as 10,000 ad placements any given time, a task that used to require an entire operations team, McConville said. In addition to pacing ads evenly, “it saved thousands of hours,” he said.
AI was also handy for quickly turning around measurement reporting.
During the Winter Games, “we were able to see campaign performance within an hour or two,” said John Alleva, EVP of platform monetization, advertising and partnerships at NBCU. It used to take multiple hours or even days to get reporting back for certain digital environments depending on the amount of data involved.
With quicker reporting, NBCU could better optimize campaigns based on reach and frequency throughout the Games.
Ad optimization for live sports streaming is something “we had not really perfected before we started doing it in Paris,” McConville said. “But we were a well-oiled machine this time.”
During the Milan Cortina Games, NBCU processed the largest volume of data in Olympics history, according to McConville, “and we did it two times faster than we did in Paris.”
That may be a brag, but it’s also a testament to the rapid digitization of live TV – and especially sports.
