Athletes aren’t the only ones competing during the Paris Olympics. Advertisers are bidding to reach tens of millions of viewers during the first programmatic Olympic Games.
NBCUniversal is selling ad inventory throughout the 2024 Paris Olympics on Peacock programmatically. The highly coveted opening and closing ceremonies are the only exception. Commercial space is available via private marketplace deals through The Trade Desk and FreeWheel.
Although most Olympics inventory will still be sold directly, programmatic is bringing in a large number of new advertisers that previously didn’t have the resources or budget to secure media during the Olympics, said Alison Levin, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships.
During a trial run in June to test programmatic ad buying, nearly every advertiser who bought in was new to the Olympics, Levin told AdExchanger. Now that the Games are underway, NBCU says 70% of brand sponsors and advertisers are new.
Still, planning and managing ad campaigns for live sports is a challenging exercise. Pricing, pacing and targeting all differ drastically for programmatic buys compared to classic insertion orders.
The cost of programmatic success
In the case of the Olympics, one obvious benefit of programmatic is lowering the barrier of entry to live sports advertising.
Media buyers can now choose from private marketplace packages (PMPs) available through The Trade Desk and FreeWheel. The All Olympics package, which includes live events and replays on Peacock and the NBC Sports app, has a $60 CPM floor price. The Olympics Highlights, which includes news coverage and replays, starts at a $40 CPM.
However, one can never take a floor price at face value – especially when it comes to Olympics inventory. Brands rushing in to bid for the chance to reach tens of millions of viewers drives up the floor price. During NBCU’s Olympics trial period to test programmatic buying in June, PMP floor prices jumped by double digits, Levin said.
If impressions get too expensive, they become less valuable because there’s a limit on how much reach and frequency a buyer can afford, said Tom Morningstar, SVP and performance lead at IPG-owned Kinesso.
“You don’t want a campaign to come out with $150 CPMs,” he said. Which is to say that programmatic buyers should keep a close eye on their bidding parameters and be sure to set maximum bids.
Beyond that, Morningstar said, it’s up to buyers to decide how much they want to spend for a spot during the Olympics. And so far, about 55% of programmatic advertisers are spending less than $5 million overall, according to The Trade Desk.
“It’s really about making sure costs don’t exceed expectations,” Morningstar said, which, of course, depends on the brand. Some brands may be comfortable paying steep CPMs in exchange for a presence throughout the Olympics.
But although bids for Olympics inventory have high CPMs, the overall cost of a programmatic campaign may still be much lower than what brands would be paying if they secured their inventory directly, said David Dworin, chief product officer at FreeWheel.
Buyers can also manage their spending by making sure the proper pacing parameters are in place, Dworin said.
Pace yourself – and your ad campaign
Campaign pacing is historically a pain point of live sports advertising because bespoke campaigns have a shorter campaign flight: the duration of a specific sports season or a championship, for example, rather than a long-term play.
This is especially true of the Olympics, which only lasts for 17 days. “It’s a very compressed timeline, [which] is a very different way of buying [programmatic],” said Verna De Jesus, VP of inventory development at The Trade Desk.
One way to manage pacing for sporting events like the Olympics is to plan and buy TV campaigns separately from other digital channels like social media, where brands might want to capitalize on conversations and hype about the Games long after the closing ceremony wraps, De Jesus said.
Frequency capping needs to be different for TV to ensure that a live sports campaign paces properly during a shorter time frame, she said. That way, brands can make sure they’re not sacrificing reach and overdoing it on frequency.
Additionally, buyers should work with ad servers equipped to detect and optimize for traffic spikes that happen when a ton of people tune into an event simultaneously, Dworin said. Otherwise, he said, an advertiser could hit its daily pacing goals too early and miss the chance to reach more people with their messaging.
From a measurement and reporting standpoint, however, programmatic buyers can and should compare cross-channel campaigns in one place, De Verna said. A cross-comparison gives buyers a sense of how much incremental reach they’re getting by hitting audiences on TV that didn’t see their ad online (or vice versa).
Incremental reach, De Jesus added, is perhaps one of the most valuable metrics for live sporting events like the Olympics.
Targeting Olympics ads
But there are downsides to buying programmatically during a live event like the Olympics, including that buyers don’t have control over where their ads are running.
Whereas direct buyers can reserve spots in the sport of their choice ahead of the Games, programmatic advertisers can’t target specific sports or events, Levin said.
The reason is because programmatic ad availability is less predictable. Matches or events can go into overtime and traffic spikes that occur when tons of people tune into one event at the same time can create random spurts of ad avails.
Still, the lack of targeting control in live sports isn’t necessarily a turn-off for brands that want to use programmatic to generate as many impressions as possible, Morningstar said.
And buyers do have some control, including over audience-based targeting – to a degree, that is.
“It’s very difficult to get first-party data into a direct IO,” Morningstar said, but programmatic makes it easier to apply first-party data to live sports campaigns, including for the Olympics.
Programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk also include information from third-party data providers that help brands create more specific segments such as, say, audiences in market for a car, people looking to book their next trip or women between the ages of 18 and 49, Morningstar said.
Although the Olympics is mainly a mass reach play for advertisers, this audience does have certain predilections. NBCU claims that Paris Olympics viewers are 24% more likely to be in market for a new car compared to the general population. As a result, auto advertisers are seeing an average of 52% more incremental brand search compared to a benchmark of auto advertisers on cable and broadcast over the past year.
Olympics programmatic advertisers can therefore get premium sports programming at a lower price point than historic linear TV.
In other words, it may not be too long before other tentpole sporting events go programmatic, too.
Let the rest of the programmatic Games begin.
