Sports sponsorships used to be a simple swap: cash for visibility. But the modern sponsorship market is being reshaped by two forces that now sit side by side in every serious deal: measurable commercial performance and societal legitimacy. Together, they are turning sponsorship from a relationship business into a governed system. And, at its core … Read more
Ever since I was a young boy, I’ve been into numbers. Now, I wasn’t a stats nerd. I just kept the stats for the Philadelphia Wings, not to the level of Harvey Pollack, affectionately known as “Superstat,” but I kept the game stats. Who scored the goals? Who got the assist? Who was in the … Read more
In January of 2023, I wrote that ChatGPT was this era’s Netscape. At the time, that was not a throwaway analogy or an attempt to ride the hype cycle. It was pattern recognition. We had seen this movie before. When Netscape arrived in the mid-1990s, it did not invent the internet. The protocols were already … Read more
This push for an 18-game season is fundamentally a revenue maximization strategy, not a competitive or fan-first initiative. Robert Kraft frames it as supporting labor and reflecting fan demand, but the underlying driver is simple: each additional regular-season game is a new, premium monetization event layered onto an already saturated sports media market. The NFL’s … Read more
None of this should feel unfamiliar if you lived through telecom, mobile, or cloud. In the early 2000s, U.S. carriers convinced themselves that owning the network meant owning the future. They optimized for ARPU, control, and contractual lock-in. Meanwhile, VoIP app companies, OTT operators, and Skype all focused on deployment speed, adoption depth, and scale … Read more
By now, it should surprise no one that Meta is methodically weaving AI deeper into its communications stack. The recent announcement of Manus Minutes — an AI-powered way to capture, summarize, and extract meaning from conversations — feels like one of those features that doesn’t stay standalone for long. Here’s my prediction: Meta will integrate … Read more
Global sports expansion is no longer a cultural victory lap. It is a hard-nosed capital strategy built for a world where domestic markets are saturated, the cable bundle is decaying, and every new media cycle has to look larger than the last one to keep valuations and leverage ratios from getting ugly. The NBA and … Read more
Most brands still get sports marketing wrong. They write big checks for stadium naming rights, slap a logo on a building, and convince themselves they’ve won. They haven’t. What I’ve learned, first from 24 years inside sports marketing and later from being involved in 63 startup exits across tech, is this: the brands that actually … Read more
Reading Marketing Dive’s piece today on “How rising retail brands use influencers to combat digital overload” gave me that familiar “we’ve done this before” feeling. The article frames creator relationships as the adaptive layer brands need when platforms keep shifting formats, algorithms, and attention, and most of all, it points to growing consumer fatigue with … Read more
We’re witnessing the end of an era and perhaps the beginning of another. The traditional sports telecast, once the hallowed perch where voices like Vin Scully and Harry Kalas painted summers in living color, is being unseated. Not by better microphones or smarter analysts, but by the app icon on your phone. Two seismic stories … Read more
