Live sports is one of programmatic’s biggest opportunities, even if the buying process is still kind of a mess. But efforts are being made.
Canadian DSP StackAdapt was one of seven buy-side partners that NBCUniversal worked with to connect with programmatic demand during the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina earlier this year.
Through that partnership, StackAdapt beta-tested a new live sports campaign workflow, which the company made generally available on Tuesday.
There’s a newly designed interface for setting up programmatic campaigns during live events and more granular controls for ad frequency, budget pacing and filtering ad inventory based on daypart or league, such as the NBA versus the WNBA.
With so many major sporting events still to come this year, including the FIFA World Cup in June, StackAdapt wants to make live-event buying more accessible to a wider range of advertisers, said Tara Buck, the company’s senior director for publisher partnerships.
More control on Game Day
But buying ad inventory during live events is still technically challenging, including having to deal with concurrent spikes in demand.
When a large number of viewers watch a streaming service at the exact same time, it creates uneven ad delivery. Buyers aren’t able to control when their ads are served or how much of the budget gets used during high-demand auctions, inadvertently wasting ad spend in the process.
To address these spikes, StackAdapt works closely with publisher partners to anticipate the QPS (queries per second) rates they expect during live events and build controls into their workflow “so nothing happens that overwhelms the system,” said Buck.
Rather than view completion or CPMs, which are more typical buying metrics for on-demand CTV, the new workflow allows advertisers to spend more gradually, she added, so ad dollars are spread more evenly and buyers don’t unintentionally throttle scale during live events.
Long-time viewer, first-time buyer
Making it easier and more transparent to transact during livestreaming events is necessary to attract first-time buyers, said Sarah VanLandingham, associate director of media strategy at performance marketing agency Silverback Strategies.
Roughly half of Silverback’s clients run ads on CTV, 20% of which are placed through StackAdapt. Most of those brands are mid-market and in categories like legal services, higher education, insurance and home repair.
Because so many of these brands prioritize lead generation, Silverback is “very anti-last click” measurement, said VanLandingham. The agency also devotes a lot of time and energy to educating its clients on the benefits of CTV, which is an important part of a full-funnel investment, she said.
When StackAdapt approached Silverback with an opportunity to buy inventory during the Olympics, VanLandingham’s team figured it would be a great fit for one of their higher education clients.
During the test, Silverback was able to pace the brand’s budget evenly across the entire weekslong event and reach its target audience of 30-to-40-year-olds. Silverback could also monitor the campaign’s success from week to week. Once it was over, the brand saw a 68% increase in impressions on Google that month, proving that viewers were searching for the university’s program after seeing its ads.
The more the merrier
Although Silverback’s Olympics test was relatively simple – meaning the target audience was rather broad and the event in question drew consistent viewers throughout – she was still surprised by how smoothly it went given her previous assumption that live events would be a “volatile testing environment.”
“Prior to this experience, I felt like the barrier to entry was so high,” said VanLandingham. “But it really isn’t as crazy as I thought it would be. You don’t have to be an enterprise-level company to run ads during the Olympics.”
Smoothing the way for more net-new advertisers against live sports – which is already a hugely competitive environment – may seem counterintuitive. But having a diverse range of brands helps with deduplication, said StackAdapt’s Buck, particularly for publishers that have strict rules about what types of ads can appear back to back.
“That’s really where we lean in and provide value to publishers,” Buck added. “You really need that diversified demand.”
