Live sports is embracing programmatic - Looking ahead

If this Sunday is anything like last year, we may see another record-breaking viewership for the Super Bowl game. The 2024 Big Game was the most-watched telecast in history with a 123.4 million average viewers across all platforms.¹ For CTV advertisers, the kicker is the fact that last year’s Super Bowl was the most streamed one in history.² ‍No surprises here! As audiences continue to cut the cord and streaming platforms secure licenses for live sports, more fans are tuning in digitally. According to eMarketer, 70% of live sports viewers are expected to watch games digitally this year, representing 114 million engaged sports fans.³

While the sky-high price tag of a Big Game spot may be out of reach for most advertisers, programmatic advertising opportunities are just beginning. With MLS and NASCAR kicking off this month, the NCAA Basketball tournament just around the corner, and the NBA going strong through June, live sports on CTV provides countless chances to connect with highly passionate audiences, both big and small, provided advertisers work with well-prepared programmatic platforms. 

The live sports challenge

Yahoo DSP taps into nearly all live sports inventory, giving advertisers access to all major professional leagues. In fact, we were recently just one of three DSPs certified to buy live sports on Disney! Reaching sports viewers programmatically presents a significant opportunity, as advertisers can leverage the same advanced targeting, frequency capping, and data-driven measurement used in other channels to drive more impactful results. However, unlike other forms of digital inventory, live events contain unpredictable commercial breaks and highly concurrent viewership, which create sudden bid request spikes. The larger the event, the bigger the spike, and this creates an array of infrastructure challenges for content owners, advertisers, and everyone in between. For DSPs specifically, these spikes can cause buyers to exhaust their budgets too quickly, leaving valuable inventory unfilled later in the event. It can also cause buyers to accidentally serve ads at too high a frequency, creating a subpar user experience.

Our standard bidding and pacing algorithm has been refined over the past twenty years to excel at delivering results for standard traffic patterns, but live sports and events traffic patterns demand a more specialized approach. Understanding this challenge, late last year, and in celebration of the one year anniversary of Yahoo Blueprint, we released an enhanced pacing algorithm specifically catered to live sports and events within Yahoo Blueprint Performance. 

Optimizing campaign pacing for the win

When an ad break occurs during a live event, and the DSP receives a spike of bid requests, Yahoo Blueprint Performance now bids and paces more effectively, with a 10x faster response time⁴ that considers the size of the spike and the advertiser’s remaining budget and flight. The result is not only more of the advertiser’s budget being spent during the event, but also a smoother distribution of impressions throughout the whole event. Advertisers should feel confident that they will spend more of their budget during these moments, without exceeding their budget or their frequency goals. 

One notable agency partner experienced the benefits of Yahoo Blueprint Performance (YBP) pacing improvements during a recent live sports campaign. In an A/B test, we compared pacing response times during a large burst of supply around noon ET. Whereas the campaign without enhanced pacing slightly surpassed daily budgets during a large burst, the new algorithm delivered more smoothly throughout the event, while effectively avoiding overspend during supply spikes.

Teaming up with the industry

Improving our own bidding algorithm is just one way Yahoo DSP wants to help advertisers capture the live event opportunity. There are many exciting challenges that still need to be solved in this space, particularly as increasingly large live events shift into programmatic. This will require investment from platforms like ours, as well as broader collaboration across the advertising ecosystem.

As an active contributor to the IAB Tech Lab’s recently formed Live Event Ad Serving subgroup, Yahoo is eager to build new standards and collaboration among all industry players to deliver live event ad experiences effectively. Some of the new ideas we are particularly excited about:

• New methods for content providers to communicate estimated viewership of live events, in advance of the event and as it’s happening, so that downstream parties (like DSPs) can scale their infrastructure appropriately and deliver ads even more efficiently on the fly.
• Updates to existing content signaling, such as adding new values to the livestream field in the Content Object to distinguish live events from general livestreamed or pre-recorded content. 
• Standards for ad creative pre-approval workflows between buyers and sellers, so that ads can be deemed compatible in advance of an event airing. With this, brands won’t miss out on those early commercial breaks because their ad was still in review.
• Lastly, innovation around prefetching and auction notifications is needed to help “flatten the spike” of live event traffic, and better inform DSPs when impressions are actually served.

As more audiences turn to CTV for live sports and events, initiatives like these will become increasingly vital in shaping the future of the programmatic advertising landscape. The industry’s ongoing efforts will not only enhance the overall viewer experience but also drive measurable outcomes for brands. We’re excited to be at the forefront of these advancements.

Sources
¹⁻²NFL, Feb 2024
³eMarketer, September 2024
⁴Internal Yahoo DSP data, Q4 2024