Securing the future of live sports inventory

The Big Game is over. The ads have been ranked. The social chatter has moved on. Now comes the harder question for advertisers: What did you actually get for the money?

For decades, live sports have been the ultimate reach buy — an unmatched scale, shared cultural attention and the prestige of showing up in moments people experience at once. That still matters. But in today’s media landscape, reach alone is no longer the finish line. It’s the starting point.

Increasingly, marketers try to close the gap by bolting YouTube or social video onto their Big Game buys and calling it a performance strategy. It’s an understandable instinct. Those platforms offer scale, data and optimization inside their walled environments. But this approach can fracture what live sports uniquely delivers: a mass, culturally coherent audience — while ceding performance learning to platforms that typically optimize only for themselves.

There is a more durable path forward. And it demands a rethink of how live sports inventory is bought, optimized and valued.

Live sports are the backbone of television reach

Live sports are no longer just tentpole inventory. As linear viewing fragments and on-demand consumption erode shared attention, live sports have become the backbone of television reach. That shift raises expectations. When live sports are the reach strategy, advertisers rightly expect accountability — not just exposure.

The industry took a meaningful step forward in 2024. The Summer Olympics on NBCUniversal marked the first truly programmatically addressable live sports moment on a global scale. Since then, others have followed, including Paramount making properties like UFC programmatically accessible.

The question is no longer whether programmatic live sports can work. It can. The question is whether it can evolve.

Expectations are highest for the most expansive inventory

Today, most live sports inventory is programmatic in plumbing only. Buyers can transact through automated pipes, but publishers retain full control over decisioning — optimizing primarily for sellout and yield, not advertiser outcomes. That results in static allocation inside the most dynamic, expensive inventory on television. It limits learning. It limits optimization. And over time, it will limit demand.

This stands in stark contrast to the rest of the media ecosystem. Across CTV and the premium open internet, advertisers increasingly decision media toward outcomes — from reach quality and frequency management to incrementality and sales impact. Live sports are becoming a lone exception, despite commanding the highest prices.

The performance gap is no longer theoretical. A Nielson study found that CTV campaigns optimized through advertiser-led decisioning delivered 25% higher sales lift than comparable campaigns executed through programmatic guaranteed buys. In other words, when advertisers are allowed to optimize toward outcomes, premium CTV doesn’t just hold its value — it performs better.

This is not a call to commoditize live sports. Advertisers are not asking to dismantle sponsorships, storytelling or pricing discipline. They are asking to optimize within publisher-defined guardrails — floors, formats, brand protections fully intact — toward business results. Performance proof doesn’t erode premium value. It reinforces it.

Critically, this model already works. Decisioned deal structures allow publishers and advertisers to align upfront commitments with real-time optimization: Inventory preferences are agreed in advance; commitments are honored; and spend is intelligently prioritized while still allowing advertisers to respond to live signals around reach, frequency and performance. The result can be a win-win — more predictability for publishers, more accountability for advertisers — without sacrificing premium controls.

Performance builds long-term preference

Scarcity alone can protect price once. It does not guarantee long-term preference.

As live sports rights proliferate across leagues, platforms and streamers, advertisers may increasingly allocate based on effectiveness, not access alone. Publishers who help advertisers prove outcomes can become stickier partners — not just for one event, but across seasons and upfront cycles.

The next step seems inevitable: biddable, decisioned live sports, layered thoughtfully on top of premium, protected inventory. Done right, this can preserve everything that makes live sports valuable while expanding demand and deepening advertiser commitment. This is evolution, not commoditization.

Elements of this model are already live. In the U.S., Disney has made live, biddable inventory available across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN through its ad server, giving advertisers programmatic access while preserving premium controls. In the U.K., Sky Sports has gone a step further, enabling real-time, biddable programmatic buying for live sports — beginning with the Premier League, one of the most valuable assets in British media.

Publishers now face a strategic choice. They can treat live sports as the final carve-out from modern media decisioning — or they can lead by making it a more accountable, outcome-driven premium inventory in television.

The latter doesn’t just protect live sports. It helps secure its future. And in a market where attention is scarce and performance is paramount, that distinction will define not only the next upfront — but the future of premium TV itself.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.