Peacock Unveils Arrival Ads on the Login Screen

Peacock is gearing up to advertise on one of the first screens many users encounter: the “profile selection” page. The new format, called Arrival Ads, allows brands to secure the best real estate before a user even selects who’s watching, an effort to make one of the app’s most-trafficked moments premium inventory.

What Peacock Is Unleashing With New Arrival Ads Format

Arrival Ads appear on the profile-picker screen, essentially offering a home-page takeover experience for connected TV consumers. In pitching marketers, NBCUniversal describes the unit as a high-impact, interactive placement that is intended to reach “nearly all daily active users.” Translation: This is prime advertising real estate that advertisers usually pay extra to control.

One creative shown to Marketing Dive features a large right-side canvas that occupies most of the screen, with users’ profiles running vertically on the left side. That’s a marked departure from the more bare-bones login designs streamers typically use, and it telegraphs that Peacock wants the ad to be seen before you’ve started watching any shows or live channels at all.

The ad-supported Peacock Premium tier currently costs $10.99 a month, or $109.99 a year — and the ad-free plan is priced at $16.99/month or $169.99/year.

For users who find the new format intrusive, the placement also conveniently serves as a nudge toward Peacock’s no-ads version — which costs $6 more per month.

Why Peacock Is Doing This Now to Boost Ad Revenue

As is the case with other streaming platforms, Peacock faces pressure to increase ad revenue and bolster margins. The service lost $217 million in the third quarter, and Comcast, its parent company, said 41 million people were paying subscribers as the period ended — unchanged from the start of 2019. When the subscriber growth engine slows, monetizing existing audiences becomes the lever — and visible surfaces like a login screen are prized for their reach and reliability.

The larger market environment is favorable for the move. At its last upfronts, Netflix said that more than 40 million people used the ad-supported tier each month around the world; Prime Video turned ads into the default experience for most of its customers. Advertisers are pouring more budget into connected TV, drawn by the television-scale reach but digital-style targeting and measurement. Arrival Ads basically bring that sell message down to an occasion that was previously unmonetized.

A Familiar Playbook Emerging Across Major Streamers

Peacock is also growing Pause Ads, which play when viewers pause, and introducing AI-driven “Contextual Targeting” to go along with live moments and relevant content. The tactic reflects a broader industry shift: Hulu introduced pause ads years ago, and Roku and Amazon sell splashy home-screen and ambient-display takeovers on their TV platforms, while YouTube’s TV app frequently runs ads on its home feed.

For advertisers, these placements offer share of voice and cut through the clutter compared with midrolls that can be skipped or ignored. For streamers, they’re a means to raise average revenue per user without getting, well, meaningfully steeper in-stream ad load, which audience members are known to scrutinize.

What Viewers Will Notice When Arrival Ads Roll Out

Look for a large visual unit on the profile screen, maybe static or with minimal interaction, that doesn’t interrupt programming since you haven’t yet watched. Peacock hasn’t spelled out the length, audio behavior or frequency caps for videos, but it looks like the format is meant to work alongside — rather than replace — pre-roll and midroll ads that are already a common sight on video.

The question is, does this detract from the path to content? Responding to those kinds of “death by a kind of involuntary birth” moments makes Arrival Ads feel willfully, paradoxically stuck within deadening templates. If these things are quick-rendering and silent by default, they can probably render the change imperceptible to barely conscious viewers. If they seem like an inconvenient, forced stop toward a show or live game, pushback might mount — and so could upgrades to the ad-free tier, which is generally part of the calculus with moves such as these.

The Business Case and Tradeoffs for Login Screen Ads

Login screens offer guaranteed, repeated exposure, which is why brands pay for takeovers of news sites, apps and game launchers. In connected TV, those moments are both anticipated and quite viewable on big screens, making them ideal for brand campaigns to attach tentpole event-related messaging.

For Peacock, AI-driven Contextual Targeting is especially important during live sports and news when in-the-moment creative can boost recall and intent. If the unit performs and inventory is curated for brand safety, advertisers perform better, and Peacock can command higher CPMs without stuffing down more commercials per show.

The tradeoff is user experience. There is a small, but real, and growing (since page speed is often not measured at sign-in) amount of friction you can get away with before people are unwilling to hit play. Each additional impression on sign-in slightly increases it. The high-wire act for the industry is unchanged: extract more value per user without pushing them over to where churn kicks in. Peacock is wagering that one high-impact ad at the door is a safer bet than attaching more brakes once viewers are in the house.

Bottom Line: Peacock Bets on High-Impact Login Ads

The Arrival Ads bring Peacock’s ad canvas up to the platform’s very first touchpoint, amid a larger trend toward monetizing high-visibility surface areas in streaming apps. With losses close at hand and the growth of subscriptions slowing, the move is pragmatic — and quite possibly profitable — as long as it keeps shortcuts to content open and creative impulses within bounds. Viewers who disagree have a choice: pay to avoid it.