🏆 Sports Brands Will Dominate Media in 2026

The era of “quality or quantity” is over. Brands must now produce both high-quality and high-volume content, using AI to optimize workflows and scale production.

For global growth, human-led localization is essential — humor, tone, and cultural relevance — not just machine translation. “Be local, not just language-literate” is now the key to expanding internationally.

Sports organizations need to use short-form video to capture attention but direct fans to long-form content (streams, podcasts, storytelling) to retain and monetize the audience.

As IMG Senior Director Lewis Wiltshire noted, in 2026 human creativity and local insight will matter more than ever, even as AI becomes “the heart of all change.”