Unofficial Partner is a brilliant podcast covering the business of sport. I highly recommend it. I’ve never been a guest, but I have written a few pieces for their website.

A recent episode featured Peter Hutton, a guy with a pretty stellar sports media background including Sky, IMSG, Eurosport and Meta. He’s also a fellow Derby County fan, which makes him clearly a great judge of football teams, to boot.

In this pod, Peter was ostensibly talking about the business of cricket, but the little nugget that jumped out at me was Peter talking about Meta selling advertising by audience rather than against specific pieces of content, and how that didn’t work for the likes of Heineken – who very much wanted to be aligned to Champions League content.

It was a nice reminder that most brands (not all, but most) aren’t just buying access to an audience when they get into sports sponsorship. The association with a specific sports property and what that says about the brand is hugely important.

It’s great if rights holders also have lots of data about their fanbase and can offer direct ways for partners to reach them and sell stuff to them, but let’s not forget the importance of brand building and the major role sponsorship can play in that.

In a world of AI-driven digital advertising and general AI slop, it’s going to be more important than ever for brands to stand above all of that, and to be seen as real, authentic, substantial.

I think sport can continue to play a big role in that for brands.