NBCUniversal’s Paris 2024 Ad Sales ‘Double’ the Pace of the Olympics in Tokyo

With 10 months to go until the opening ceremony in Paris, NBCUniversal is seeing record-setting ad sale revenue.

The company is “further ahead than we’ve ever been, from a pure sales perspective,” Dan Lovinger, president of Olympic and Paralympic partnerships, told Adweek, saying the best comparison would be the company’s performance with the original 2020 Olympics in Tokyo during the same time frame.

But really, there is no comparison.

“We’re probably double where we were at this point,” Lovinger said.

The company totaled more than $1.2 billion in revenue for the 2020 games, and NBCUniversal previously told Adweek that it was seeing strong interest in the 2024 event ahead of this year’s TV upfront.

Thus far, that strong interest has resulted in a sell-out across numerous platforms for all live opening ceremony positions and halftime sponsorship positions for team competitions such as soccer and basketball.

Additionally, the company’s new Olympic Prime pod sponsorships are sold out. For 13 nights in primetime, the company will limit commercial interruptions around its biggest events, with a single advertiser being mentioned each night in the lead-up.

“During a half-hour, there will only be one 60-second break, and it will be a double box,” Lovinger said. “So if it were the 100-meter final, you might see them stretching, getting ready, but we certainly wouldn’t have an ad running during the race.”

Those 13 spots have been filled by ring holders, which are Olympic sponsors that can put their logos beside trademarks like the Olympic rings and are generally category-exclusive.

Though Lovinger told Adweek that no particular category stands out among others, automotive is the strongest relative to where it was heading into Tokyo.

Going for golden opportunities

NBCUniversal is also expecting “significant moments” for the women of Team USA, with more than 50% of coverage dedicated to women’s sports.

“When you look at all of broadcast, those games will be over 90% of all coverage of women in sports and broadcast for the 2024 year,” Lovinger said. “We’re getting requests to build things specifically around the women competing.”

For the first time in the history of the Summer Games, every Olympic and Paralympic event will be streaming live and on-demand on Peacock, with more programming hours on the NBC broadcast network than any previous games.

“With something like Peacock in Tokyo, we were just getting started. Now we can bring every event live and on demand, so you can expect significant growth in our Peacock audiences for the Olympics,” said Lovinger, noting that the company has seen double-digit growth in viewership in other sports when fans returned to the stands for the first time.

“This is the Olympics first post-pandemic coming out party,” Lovinger said.

New marketing approaches

Following three straight games taking place in Asia, Paris is giving NBCUniversal an opportunity “like we haven’t had before,” according to Jenny Storms, the company’s CMO of sports and entertainment.

“We ripped up the playbook and we started over,” Storms said. “The Paris element, and that visual opportunity of these events juxtaposed against an Eiffel Tower, it allows us to do so much more and bring it to life.”

Storms is approaching the Olympics with a three-pronged strategy: driving relevance, athlete storytelling and bringing content to life outside of the Olympics. And that strategy is already manifesting itself in creating brand relevance around campaigns with Paris Hilton, Dolly Parton and Peyton Manning.

“We’ve seen greater awareness, greater intent-to-view than we ever have before,” said Storms. “We know that all of this is resonating.”