Universal Ads brings Winter Olympics inventory to small and mid-size brands

For brands that have built their businesses on social media and search advertising, major events like the Olympics have always been out of reach.

The multimillion-dollar ad packages sold by networks are designed for Fortune 500 budgets, not for a direct-to-consumer skincare company or a regional retailer with a five-figure media spend.

Universal Ads, the self-service advertising platform operated within the Comcast NBCUniversal family, is now testing whether that can change.

The platform, roughly 18 months old, made its live event debut with the 2026 Winter Olympics, offering biddable ad inventory across NBC platforms, including Peacock, to advertisers who have largely been shut out of television.

“This is a huge opportunity for us to bring that type of scale and that type of premium inventory to our clients,” said Melissa Greenberg, head of partnerships and product solutions at Universal Ads. “Most of our clients are brands that have never advertised on TV before.”

The distinction between what Universal Ads offers and what NBCUniversal’s direct sales team sells comes down to structure. The network’s sales operation handles large-scale sponsorship packages. Universal Ads operates a biddable marketplace, where advertisers set their own bids, define target audiences and compete for available impressions.

“Advertisers are able to go into the platform, bid what they can or what they want, and align with their target audience. And if they win the bid, they get served,” Greenberg said.

That inventory comes at a higher cost than standard programmatic buys. Greenberg acknowledged that advertisers pay a premium for alignment with live event content like the Olympics, and said her team has worked to frame that cost in the context of the content’s reach.

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“A lot of them buy on our Performance Plus product, which is across our entire network. And now a lot of them are testing the idea of aligning with content, but they’re fully aware that there’s some tax to it to have that kind of access,” Greenberg said.

A significant portion of Universal Ads’ work involves infrastructure that goes beyond ad serving.

Greenberg said most of the platform’s clients do not have television-ready creative assets when they begin, and the Olympics in particular required new creative production due to specific rules governing advertising during the Games.

Universal Ads offers both in-house creative services and access to third-party creative partners to address that gap.

“We are in it with our clients, and we want to make sure that we’re setting them up for success. This is white glove service, whether that’s helping them with creative or helping them create the framework for a measurement study,” said Greenberg.

The platform now works with more than 20 publishers and positions itself as an end-to-end service for advertisers entering the TV market, covering creative production, audience targeting, media buying and measurement.

The Winter Olympics mark Universal Ads’ first foray into live-event advertising, but the platform’s roadmap suggests it will not be the last.

NBCUniversal holds rights to the FIFA World Cup, which will air on Telemundo later this year, and the broader NBC sports calendar includes additional tentpole events.

“Given the reception that we’re getting from our advertisers, I definitely see a future of us building programs around live events and especially around the NBC live events,” Greenberg said.

She said the Olympics will also serve as a learning exercise for the organization’s operational capabilities, from supporting advertisers during weekend and off-hours broadcasts to understanding how much appetite smaller brands have for premium content pricing.

“We’re going to learn a lot about where advertisers want to run, their appetite for running against premium content, their appetite for paying more of a premium for live events,” Greenberg said.

The broader bet Universal Ads is making is that the brands now spending primarily on social and search will view television not as an awareness channel but as a performance one. Whether the Olympics prove that thesis at scale is something the platform’s measurement partners will be tracking closely in the weeks ahead.

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