NBCUniversal has completed its upfront advertising sales effort for the 2024-2025 TV season, with “modest growth” across all its businesses.

A year ago, NBCU said its upfront advertising sales efforts were roughly in line with the previous year -- estimated to be slightly above $7 billion for the 2023-2024 TV season.

“This year’s upfront, NBCUniversal saw growth in advertising commitments across its portfolio in key business areas including strategic audiences, live programming, and streaming — demonstrating the value of our storytelling and the strength of our powerful tech stack to the marketplace,” said Mark Marshall, chairman, global advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal in a statement. 

NBCU says it earned year-over-year double-digit volume gains across many areas -- 45% higher in prime-time program advertising -- with growth of nearly 60% in news and 90% in sports programming.

A strong focus on sports programming across all industry-wide linear TV network groups -- amid declines in entertainment viewing -- has yielded higher advertising revenues for all sports content.

NBCU says its sports digital platforms showed double-digit percentage volume growth, with Hispanic-based sports programming up by nearly 20%.  

Direct-to-consumer platforms -- which include NBCU’s Peacock -- posted upfront advertising volume increases of around 50% among its small to-medium sized marketers. In 2023, Peacock took in $1.4 billion in advertising.

The company also says that overall, it has had its largest digital upfront ad-sales volume to date.  

NBCUniversal did not reveal specific unit pricing for its linear TV platforms or streaming services. Industry-wide reports suggested cost-per-thousand price (CPM) declines -- especially for entertainment programming -- were down around 5%.

Another factor has been softness in growth and/or declines in CPMs at streaming platforms from the major legacy TV-network based companies due to Amazon Prime Video. Earlier this year, it launched a massive amount of ad inventory in the marketplace with its start of a lower priced ad-supported tier.

Last year’s overall upfront ad market had 3% volume growth to $27.1 billion, according to Media Dynamics -- with linear TV down 5% to $19.1 billion and streaming 31% higher to $8.0 billion.