2026 is shaping up to be a massive year for live sports, with fans gearing up for a packed calendar in football, rugby, cricket, basketball and tennis. Whether fans are streaming a match on their CTV, scrolling through tournament highlights on YouTube Shorts or shopping for players’ gear on Google Search, your brand can be right there in the middle of the action.
It kicks off this February as the world’s top athletes take to the winter sports stage. To help advertisers, we are announcing access to NBCUniversal’s Olympic Winter Games programmatic inventory and pairing it with new biddable live sports updates on Google Display & Video 360. Here are some of the latest features to help connect brands with customers:
- Unified Reach and Personalization Upgrades: Combine Google’s audience signals with NBCUniversal’s live sports CTV inventory. Reach fans on the big screen, and re-engage them as they watch behind-the-scenes footage on YouTube.
- Frequency Management: Our cross-device frequency management understands household-level signals to maximize impact and prevent ad fatigue across all inventory and devices.
- Cross-device Conversion: Leveraging Google AI, this feature connects the dots between a CTV impression and purchase. This gives marketers real time visibility into the ROI of their Live CTV sports campaigns, at no extra cost.
- New Curated Inventory: Forget about wading through different media options. With our new Marketplace design, activating live sports packages takes only a few clicks.
Marketers can now enjoy the high reach of live sports and the precision of our biddable CTV tools in Display & Video 360.
