As Australia heads into the AFL and NRL grand finals, advertisers are preparing for two of the biggest, most valuable live viewing moments of the year, writes Yael Milbank, managing director ANZ, Magnite.
Grand Finals are genuine cultural moments, drawing huge audiences – including people who may not follow the game all season – often around the biggest screen in the house, at parties or in pubs. It’s a shared experience with high attention that’s hard to find elsewhere.
But the commercial opportunity around live sport no longer starts at the first kick-off and ends at the final siren. Fans engage across a much broader window – the pre-game build-up, the analysis, the post-match highlights and conversation that follow – and advertising increasingly reflects that.
The live event delivers the biggest audience spike, but it’s not necessarily where every advertising opportunity sits. Depending on the sport and broadcaster, breaks during play can be limited. The pre-game window, when anticipation is building, and the post-game period, when emotions are high and there is a result to react to, can be particularly valuable. Our Australian research found that one third of viewers engage with pre- and post-event coverage, while 53 per cent say advertising within this shoulder content makes brands more memorable. As a result of these behaviours, we are seeing buyers think about exposure across the whole viewing window.
While the live game remains the centrepiece, the opportunity is to build around it.
From a single broadcast to a connected viewing journey
Major sporting events show this shift especially well, but the principle extends across live streaming more broadly. Audiences move between connected TV, mobile, highlights and social platforms as an event unfolds – 60 per cent of Australians use mobile to stream live content, while nearly half regularly use a second screen while watching TV. This offers advertisers a much larger canvas than the traditional 15- or 30-second commercial break.
Broadcaster sponsorships and integrations continue to play an important role, particularly around major events where brands want a strong association with the moment itself. Programmatic can complement this investment by helping to extend a campaign across the broader viewing journey, including CTV, with greater targeting and flexibility.
The strongest approach is in combining these two approaches rather than prioritising one over another. It’s owning the big moment through sponsorship, then using programmatic to carry that message before, during and after, and tailoring creative to the result or the mood of the fans.
The anticipation and aftermath do not replace the scale of the live game, but rather they amplify it.
New formats expand engagement around live
As the viewing journey expands, so do the ways advertisers can engage with audiences. Shoulder content, pause ads, interactive formats, home-screen placements and commerce-enabled experiences all offer additional touchpoints to connect with viewers outside the traditional commercial break. Seeing value from these opportunities comes from matching the format and message to the moment rather than treating every touchpoint in the same way.
Television can remain the high-attention environment for storytelling and brand impact, while mobile offers a natural route to discovery and purchase. With 37 per cent of Australians likely to engage with shoppable ads, commerce is one example of how that journey can extend beyond the television screen.
For media owners, this means thinking about the live event as a broader proposition, extending deals beyond the game itself and positioning shoulder content as an integral part of the event, not an add-on.
Infrastructure is what turns creative opportunity into commercial value
As live inventory and ad formats become more sophisticated, their value increasingly depends on the infrastructure behind them. Unilever CMO Leandro Barreto recently described effective marketing as requiring both “poetry and plumbing” – strong creative, backed by the platforms needed to deliver it. That is especially true in live streaming, where new formats only create value if inventory, demand and delivery can be coordinated reliably at scale.
Live streaming brings challenges that on-demand environments don’t face. When play stops during a major event, hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers can enter an ad break at almost exactly the same time, and every stream needs an advertising decision made and delivered within seconds. That sudden concentration of demand puts enormous pressure on the infrastructure underneath the experience.
Publishers and their technology partners can plan for a lot – kick-off time, when breaks will fall and expected audience levels – but live is unpredictable by nature. A close finish, extra time or an upset can push viewing well beyond forecasts, so systems need to scale in real time when demand spikes.
For advertisers, it means clear visibility into upcoming inventory to plan around, and confidence that the campaign they bought will actually reach its audience. For publishers, it means capturing the full value of their highest-demand moments without losing opportunities to timeouts or delivery issues. When the infrastructure performs, both sides get the full value of the moment.
And for the viewer, success is much simpler: the advertising experience works and they get back to the game without a hitch.
The next phase of live streaming advertising won’t be about squeezing more ads into premium content. It will be about recognising the entire audience journey – the anticipation, the main event and the conversation afterwards – and using better formats, smarter buying and stronger infrastructure to make each moment count.
