NBCUniversal is looking to have a Super upfront, even amid the current economic uncertainty. In this year’s annual advertising showcase, the Comcast-owned company is touting the 20th year of Sunday Night Football, the return of the NBA to NBC, and the return of BravoCon, as well as traditional holiday events like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. NBCU will also have a busy February that will feature the 2026 Winter Olympics (starts Feb. 6), Super Bowl 60 (Feb. 8), and the NBA All-Star Game (weekend of Feb. 13), all happening within two weeks of each other. Meanwhile, the summer brings the Spanish-language broadcast of the World Cup on Telemundo. With all of that happening amongst NBC’s upcoming 100th anniversary—and Peacock continuing to grow its subscribers and revenue—Karen Kovacs, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships, told ADWEEK that the company is expecting a “monumental” year. “Content has always been a main differentiator for NBCUniversal,” Kovacs said. “But this upcoming year—I would say two years—will be unlike any other, and we have this massive opportunity.” However, like all publishers heading into upfront season, NBCU has to deal with the ongoing economic upheaval largely brought on by the tariffs enacted under the Trump administration, which could have a wide-ranging impact from increased production costs to reduced ad budgets for the TV industry. In an interview with ADWEEK ahead of NBCU’s upfront presentation on May 12, Kovacs previewed NBCU’s upfront and answered how the company is approaching the current macroeconomic uncertainty. ADWEEK: NBCU is showcasing a lot of tentpoles this year, including the Super Bowl and the World Cup on Telemundo. How does the company approach those priorities to give each its proper due? Kovacs: Internally, we have been working across our IP through Symphony, which is our known marketing nomenclature for how we work across the company, but I think we’ve done a great job. We consider ourselves storytellers in the marketing community. No one is better. We can carry IP through our ecosystem, whether from the theater to the living room, streaming to parks, and clients are excited. The beauty of working with clients from all different categories, from enterprise partners to small business partners, is that we usually have a solution that we can find across an entire ecosystem. It’s going to be driven by what the marketers are looking for. You mentioned having clients of all sizes, and we’ve already seen the first programmatic Olympics. Could we have the first programmatic Super Bowl in some way? I would say we did have success and have continued success programmatically enabling sports, but I think we have more to come on how we’re thinking about programmatic going forward. It seems there’s always economic uncertainty heading into the upfront. But one of the big things in the news today is the tariffs. Do you anticipate any impact from the tariffs? What’s the messaging you’re telling clients? We’re all reading what everyone else is reading, too, but I think our opinion is that, given the changing macroeconomic climate, it’s a little too early to predict the impact on ad spend. We’re speaking to CMOs and marketers across every category to find solutions and help them maintain spend and create growth opportunities. What we’re hearing is that, as marketers are scenario planning, they’re also looking back at the uncertainty over time. We’ve seen the research. They’ve seen the research that shows the best course of action for brands is to keep advertising to drive everything from increased sales, protect or grow market share, and maintain brand health, compared to those that may, in uncertainty, go dark. NBCU’s ad sales chief, Mark Marshall, told ADWEEK last year that some multiyear advertisers were already talking Super Bowl. Can you talk about your approach to the Super Bowl this year and what demand you’re seeing? I can say that we’re already speaking to marketers about the entire month of February. There is enormous interest in the Super Bowl, Milano Cortina Olympics, and NBA All-Star Game. There is a lot of interest in each component and all of them together. I think part of that comes back to the power of live sports. Live sports for us are an incredible opportunity. We see, from an advertiser effectiveness standpoint, there’s an uptick throughout the purchase funnel due to live. We’ll have over 7,500 hours of live sports on Peacock. We’re seeing demand throughout the year, with a particular focus on those two weeks in February. What are advertisers excited about when it comes to the World Cup? Consumers are already excited, and this is an event that’s happening in summer 2026. There’s already massive buzz. We’ve done some research: 78% of Hispanics in the U.S. are already aware of the tournament, so that’s 13% ahead of the general population. They’re excited to be a part of this historic event. And it’s interesting because now that the World Cup is in North America, there’s a lot of excitement just about the whole ecosystem. The fact that they want to attend in person just adds to the whole fandom, and we think that fandom is going to carry through into the engagement on Telemundo. And I’m excited about BravoCon. It was gone for a year. Now it’s back from Nov. 14-16 in Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. What can you tell us about it? The fandom behind BravoCon is really, really unique. At the last BravoCon, we posted 20 onsite partners, and all of the research that we’ve seen, there was a 99% brand recall across every single onsite partner. We’re seeing a strong response across a wide array of categories: insurance, home furnishing, CPG. There is a lot of appetite for a custom approach and a bespoke onsite approach. The NBA is also coming back to NBC. How can advertisers get involved? What are the opportunities? Advertisers are very excited about the NBA coming to NBCU. I think it’s interesting on a couple of points. We’re excited to have the NBA back on broadcast. So when you think about the reach and scale of broadcast, that is really exciting for us, for the NBA, and for our marketing partners. It will be interesting to see how we weave the NBA across our portfolio for marketers. That’s one of the hallmarks of working with NBCUniversal is that you can certainly tap into a property like the NBA. The NBA will be on NBC on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Suddenly, you have the NBA on Tuesday night as a lead-in to [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon]. When you think about the storytelling that you can do, that you can carry through, from these live sports events to a Jimmy Fallon program, the storytelling has more legs, and there’s more scale and more ability to cross-promote and cross-pollinate how the brands show up. You mentioned advertisers of all sizes, so what can you tell us about Comcast Universal Ads, which looks to give small and medium businesses (SMBs) the opportunity to access premium TV inventory? We’ve been in this space for a bit, and we’ve seen that 50% found their ROI from social video buying has almost peaked or diminished. So the opportunity to come in and have access to TV is really exciting. We saw that in the last Olympics: 90% of programmatic buyers were new to the Olympics. There’s demand for us there, and as we open up all of these channels again, this is just a unique way for us to really be solution-oriented for the SMBs. Heading into this upfront, Nielsen now has MRC-certified panel plus big data for measurement. However, the industry has been in a multi-currency reality for a while now. How is NBCU approaching measurement and currency? We’re partnerships agnostic. Our [advertisers] have their partners, and they become our partners. If they want to transact on Nelson One or Nielsen big data plus panel, they can. Everything we do is in service of our mission to make our advertising partners’ media dollars more effective, so we are open to partnerships.