ADWEEK Advantage is part of a series where every month, our top editors interpret what happened in each vertical, and what it means for the future.
Live sports is the last mass media format where audiences congregate to watch in real time, making them one of the few places brands can still achieve cultural cachet at scale.
Ad buyers even expect sports to make up 60% of the upfront this year—it was half of that just five years ago.
While agencies have been building sports capabilities, these investments have mostly been incremental rather than transformational. Stagwell launched Sport Beach in 2022 and recently spun the franchise off into its own business unit.
