Brand-building is about making yourself appealing to the 95% who are not in-market for your brand today, but will be in the future.

A quarterfinal appearance or better for the U.S. men's team could create one of the most valuable audience events in American sports outside of the NFL and drive record demand for soccer ad inventory, elevate sponsorship opportunities, and accelerate soccer's position within the broader U.S. sports marketing landscape.

In the old days, Nielsen could make a new media supplier "currency." These days, it's MRC accreditation. Point-of-Care is a case in point.

The long-time Horizon Media digital chief's next new gig is Chief Strategy Officer of Media Consulting Group, which has some unique, and differentiated ways of curating programmatic inventory, he says.

Too many brands still approach sports marketing transactionally: a logo on a jersey, a tentpole event, or a media buy designed to maximize impressions. These tactics may generate reach, but reach alone is no longer enough.

The good news is the percentage of advertisers concerned about the "transparency" of their media agencies has gone down since the ANA first benchmarked the issue in 2014. The bad news is it remains a significant level of concern and has been growing due to the rise principal media-buying.

And now the ANA knows which half. Its Q1 programmatic benchmark reveals advertisers are stratifying into two distinct "lower" and "higher" performing groups.

So far, AI is just another tool for persuading humans, but when consumers hand off to AI agents, humans will be out of the loop. That's not something marketers have faced before. Humans have always been the target. Until now.

"We're moving beyond the old model where great work required layers of outside agencies, long timelines, and huge production budgets. With AI, stronger in-house teams, and smarter production models, brands can now create at a much higher level, much more consistently."

That's what I asked Brandience's Brian McHale when he briefed me on the agency's new AI-generated "Synthetic Market Research & Testing" system.