1) Who will stick up for TNT Sports?
Whitewashed in the Uefa club competition media rights process – with Paramount+ now likely to parachute the CBS Golazo Champions League magic into living rooms across Europe – and lambasted for its cricket coverage of the Ashes in Australia, commentator Jonathan Overend has united many of his colleagues with a spirited defence.
2) Are AI engines becoming the friendly faces of the tech mega brands?
We live in peculiar times indeed when the first question we seem to ask of any particular challenge, process, creative endeavour or artistic output is ‘Can AI do it?’ Let’s cut out the middle man of life and check straight on in to the nursing home right now. I suppose it’s not surprising for the AI question to be asked at every turn inside the giant tech firms who are building the dominant models. But there’s more than a scintilla of irony in the trend for those giant tech firms putting their AI front and centre in their marketing activity. Google has extended its deal with McLaren and put Gemini ‘at the heart of its collaboration’. Meta renewed with Mercedes last month to make Meta AI a team partner. Even Adobe is getting in on the action, expanding a deal with Real Madrid to put its AI capability at the core of its activation. Marketing bets are being made that the most relatable, human side of these corporations is… artificial intelligence.
3) Is it actually about the destination, not the journey?
Unlike so many, former Channel 4 boss Alex Mahon is worth listening to when she speaks about AI. She was at the AI Creative Summit recently offering her view of creative work as three distinct parts: craft, creativity and curation. If AI starts to take on the bulk of the ‘craft’ work, as Mahon opines, then curation – human taste and judgements presented and packaged for other humans – becomes paramount. This is broadly my view on the future of media. We will follow humans we trust to point us towards output pieced together largely by code. Not everyone agrees with Mahon, though. Advertising maven Sir John Hegarty slid into her comments to stick up for craft as fundamental to the human process of creativity. And of course, he’s right. It is in the making, the iterating, that we grow and learn. Often the process is more valuable than the end point. Do we take notes in a meeting to have something to refer back to, or to engage more fully with what’s being discussed in order to have the information synthesized into memory?
4) What’s the point of brand equity if humans start outsourcing purchase decisions to AI?
Add Daniel Ayers’ name to the list of those worth listening to on AI. He provides the backbone and the brain power in the latest IMG Digital Trends Report this year. It’s reliably impressive; a must-read. A couple of thoughts: sports organisations need to prepare for a world in which AI makes purchase decisions for consumers. The old rules – SEO, brand marketing etc – won’t hold here. And did you ever think you’d read the phrase ‘Creators, Discord admins, and the mods of your subreddits should absolutely be invited to media days and sent official comms announcements’?
5) Is now the best time to be a sports lawyer?
It’s rarely a bad time to be a sports lawyer, in truth, but if you’re one of an apparently very small pool of established practitioners capable of executing transactions with major league entities, then these are salad days indeed.
6) What if I haven’t quite made it to the bar yet?
Fear not, there are a stack of intriguing roles on the market at the moment:
• You could combine premium sports hospitality with the development of incredibly valuable networks in the casino industry or banking in either of these specialist Sales Director roles with On Location.
• Perhaps you’d like to recommend a payrise for your favourite NFL executive with this $215,000 HR role at the league office in New York.
• Maybe newsletters and cosying up to creators is more your thing. You’d probably fit right in as the new, $250,000 Head of Sports Partnerships at Substack.
• Do you identify as a UK creative industry thought leader? You might quite fancy joining Jay Hunt’s small, specialist creative team at Apple Originals in the UK.
7) What’s one ironclad, triple-locked, nailed-on trend I can put my house on continuing into 2026?
CEOs getting in front of an in-house camera to deliver human, relatable messages that might otherwise have been trotted out in a press release or as a statement on a website. New ITF leader Ross Hutchins is bang on trend here.
8) Are music venues better naming rights options than sports stadiums?
The marketing folks at British Airways, fresh from attaching the brand to the name of the new music venue at London’s Olimpia, probably think so. And TikTok have had similar thoughts down in Australia.
