NBC Seeks $7 Million for 2026 Super Bowl Commercials in Early Ad Talks

The kickoff to Super Bowl LX is nearly a year away, but NBCUniversal is already at work trying to tackle ad dollars for the glitzy sports event.

NBCU has already indicated it will seek around $7 million for a 30-second commercial roost in the Big Game, according to media buyers and other people familiar with early conversations. That price would stand even with or perhaps a little higher than what Fox initially sought for ad time in Super Bowl LIX, which aired in February. While Fox was able to sell some commercials for an eye-popping $8 million, those numbers came after the network experienced higher-than-anticipated demand and some sponsors, including State Farm, asked to get out of their deals following the recent California wildfires.

NBC declined to make executives available for comment.

NBCU is believed to be nearing the end of its approach to so-called “incumbent” advertisers, or those who took part in its last Super Bowl showing in 2022. TV networks typically give those past sponsors an exclusive window of time to sign up for a new ad deal before opening sales to a broader swath of Madison Avenue.

The company is relying on the Super Bowl and several other high-impact sports events as the spine of its programming strategy for the next year. NBC will start telecasting NBA games in the fall of 2025, and will feature the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the NBA All-Star Game in the first quarter of 2026. The company has been eager to discuss ad packages that include all three events, according to buyers and executives familiar with discussions.

There may already be some flags on the field. To be sure, the value of sporting events to advertisers has grown exponentially in the streaming era. Marketers ranging from Apple to Zicam are eager to get their commercials in front of the biggest audiences possible — and all of them in the recent past are usually found watching live sports. And yet, there are some new concerns about the economy and consumers’ willingness to spend as the Trump administration probes the use of tarriffs and cuts government jobs. These worries could make singing up advertisers more difficult — even for a top audience draw like the Super Bowl.

This isn’t the first time NBCU has tried such a pitch. In 2022, the media giant showed both the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in the same month. As part of its pitch, NBCU has been sharing research with potential customers showing that advertisers that only bought the Super Bowl ads that year missed out on 42 million potential viewers from the Olympics, while those who only bought the Olympics missed out on 30 million viewers from the Super Bowl.

Fox Corp. in February revealed it generated around $800 million in ad revenue from its telecast of Super Bowl LIX across the Fox broadcast network, the Tubi streaming service and Fox Deportes and Telemundo Spanish-language broadcast outlets. Sponsors included PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Instacart, Stellantis and Unilever.

NBCU is, like many other media companies, seeking a “match” of ad dollars that would have Super Bowl sponsors commit a separate amount of money to other parts of the NBCU portfolio, according to media buyers.