As the 2026-27 season opens, advertisers are throwing ad dollars toward the NBA’s crowd of younger viewers, accelerating investment on sponsorships, streaming ads and sports-adjacent creator activity.
The new season is set to invite high spending on linear and streaming coverage, as well as paid social and creator activity for brands that find themselves locked out, according to five media buyers who spoke with Digiday.
“Demand is very high for the NBA across the board,” said Adam Schwartz, svp and director of national broadcast, sports media at Horizon Media.
NBA sponsorship investments have been rising steadily in recent years. Sponsorships now account for 15% of NBA revenues, which stand at at least $1.9 billion a year, a collective investment driven by companies like blockchain and digital security firm Ledger, which struck a deal with the San Antonio Spurs last year.
Ledger’s logo on Spurs jerseys, and its status as the team’s official digital asset partner is a key part of the company’s bid to drive awareness among consumers adjacent to Texas’ booming tech sector.
Ariel Wengroff, evp of communications and marketing at Ledger, said the brand was attempting to reach “the type of customer who is excited and engaged through being a Spurs fan, [who’s] crypto- and digital asset-curious.”
Per a study conducted by Wakefield Research Partners, it’s had an impact already: Spurs fans are 4.8 times as likely to say Ledger is a market-leading firm in its category than regular consumers, and twice as likely to prefer Ledger over competitors.
Non-sponsors have a different menu available. Running spots against live coverage of the games themselves, is inevitably atop many marketers’ lists.
Last season — the first year of the NBA’s refreshed rights deal with NBC, Amazon and others — streaming ad spend rose to $874 million. Even as linear’s share of NBA ad spend falls, there’s limited linear inventory remaining, while some broadcasters are gating NBA spots behind combination buys with other inventory, a practice they typically employ for moments like the Super Bowl.
“Amazon’s completely sold out. They’re trying to get people to go into their NBA League Pass product in order to clear some room,” Schwartz said. While the viewership figures are still much lower than linear coverage (NBC’s regular season games drew an average of 2.8 million viewers last season, versus Amazon Prime Video’s average of 1 million), streaming inventory is hardly a consolation prize these days for brands.
“The NBA has a younger, more digitally inclined viewer… streaming has to be considered,” said Jeff Gagne, svp of sports marketing at Havas.
But following a robust linear and streaming market last year, media buyers told Digiday that demand was high enough that Peacock, Amazon and Disney inventory is all but sold out already.
“Sellout was the name of the game last year,” said one holdco media buyer, who exchanged anonymity for candor. “It’s a very strong, healthy market again, with high sellout in certain games, and if you were to try to get inventory, it would be extremely tight right now to do that.”
Demand is especially tight now, with the season opening amid the traditional Q4 holiday push. PMG’s head of brand media Natalee Cecil said some of the agency’s clients were looking to use the NBA’s large audiences to deliver Thanksgiving or Black Friday messaging, before dipping in advance of the season’s mid-point.
“It’s a long season, and so having a consistent present presence throughout the season is something that we’re not seeing too much demand for,” said Cecil.
Sponsors sometimes contribute to that demand, but often let their logo placements or partnerships do the work, rather than invest more dollars in TV. Wengroff told Digiday that Ledger had focused its “limited’ sponsorship-adjacent paid media on TikTok and X, but planned to increase the volume of its activity this year and next.
Access to NBA superstars like French player Victor Wembanyama has also boosted demand for partnership deals.
As well as social content (Ledger sponsored the restoration of a basketball court in Wembanyama’s French hometown of Nanterre), having players show up at corporate or sales events and outside the U.S. has proven useful. “It’s been really great for us in retail and our experiential strategy,” said Wengroff.
But while NBA sponsors often get first pick on working with big NBA names through their partnership agreements, there’s little stopping advertisers working with off-the-court creators, streamers and influencers.
Paid social buys targeted to find NBA audiences distracted by a second screen around game times, or well-timed creator activity, could be the go-to option for marketers locked out of the pricey TV and CTV market.
Iniabasi Ikpot, director of comms strategy and planning at Media by Mother, said that while brands could use what inventory is available on the scatter market to “be present throughout the ebbs and flows of the season,” they might find more success in choosing their moments.
“There’s more peaks than ever. You have the NBA Cup, the playoff tournaments, Christmas Day… that’s when we tend to go more direct, more creator-led, and try to land a deeper story,” said Ikpot.
That could include court side perspectives from creators at the game, or activity deploying NIL creators or college basketball players.
“If I was the sponsor who couldn’t get into the game, and I really wanted to connect with the NBA culture… I’d pivot to a strategy of connecting with athletes as creators and fall back on other things that are interesting within the NBA community,” said the holdco buyer.