Dan Lovinger, who supervised an increasingly complex Olympics ad-sales effort for NBCUniversal and delivered what is believed to be a record level of Madison Avenue sponsorship for the recent Paris Olympics, is leaving the company as it seeks to revamp its efforts to lure advertisers to sports.
NBCU in 2022 assigned Lovinger to a new role overseeing all efforts to sell ads for the Olympics and Paralympics, separating him from the rest of the company’s sports sales. With NBC’s recent pact to secure NBA rights, however, the company sees sports as a significantly bigger driver of its business, and wants to have Olympics deals and other sports sponsorships sold in tandem in a bid to sell bigger packages.
In a memo sent to staffers Monday, Allison Levin, a president of NBCU ad-sales who supervises sales of national, local and sports media, said that sports and Olympics would be sold together, a bid to “leverage a unified strategy across all sports assets to maximize revenue from our properties.” The team will be led by Peter Lazarus, who heads up NBCU’s general sports sales and who was named to the role in 2022.
The change is part of a restructuring led by Levin, one of her first significant moves since arriving at NBCU from Roku in late 2023. She called for NBCU ad-sales staffers to become “hyper-focused on growing the business, selling audiences first and maximizing revenue for our big moments.” The changes will result in a small handful of staffers leaving, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Under the changes, Levin intends to hire a new executive vice president who will supervise efforts to drive revenue from new advertisers and new kinds of partnerships. Many traditional media companies have sought to generate new sales from small- and medium-sized businesses that have not traditionally bought national TV. They are also placing new emphasis on so-called “audience buying,” or the purchase of packages that aim to get commercials in front of a particular niche of consumers, such as first-time car buyers or expectant parents.
Lovinger held a series of top sales roles at NBCU, including oversight of sales for the NBC broadcast network and the USA cable network, two of the companies biggest properties, and, in another role, sales of the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo. In 2016, he was named to head up all sports ad sales at the company. And in 2022, he was given oversight of the Olympics in particular, with then-NBCU ad-sales chief Linda Yaccarino noting at the time that the Games “are key to our success and need dedicated focus.”
The arrival of NBA games, expected to take place after the league’s next season, will add even more sports inventory to NBCU’s schedule, and will likely be used to boost subscriptions to Peacock, the company’s streaming service. Even the Olympics may not be big enough to drive the ad packages NBCU and its parent, Comcast, will need during an intense time for traditional media conglomerates as they seek to follow consumers, who are increasingly moving away from linear TV and watching content on demand.
Lovinger has built an interesting career, one that had him offering innovative concepts to advertisers no matter how large the property under consideration. During the Paris Olympics, for example, NBCU struck a deal with the large GroupM media buying agency to create a commercial break that consisted solely of that firm’s clients. NBC also allowed a clothing manufacturer, FIGS, to sponsor heart-rate monitor displays placed strategically on the parents of various U.S. Olympic competitors — a bid to help boost the drama for viewers at home.
But he also devised new ideas for other types of programming. Last decade, Lovinger worked to secure sponsors for a series of live theatrical plays shown on NBC by allowing the advertisers to use the characters already being featured in the shows. One of the deals involved allowing Walmart to use the Tinker Bell character from “Peter Pan” during a live telecast of the theatrical.
He previously held senior positions at Viacom and Time Warner.
Lazarus rejoined NBCUniversal in 2013 as a senior vice president of ad sales after working senior sales roles at Univision and USA Today. He first worked for NBCU for about nine years between 1997 and 2006. He is the brother of Mark Lazarus, one of NBCUniversal’s most senior executives, who has oversight of the company’s TV and streaming operations.
