The Premier League is back and there’s an AI game for brands
Opinion
The CEO and founder of The Liberty Guild on how AI will change everything that happens around 90 minutes of football, and what it means for agencies competing to get clients into the answers.
The Premier League is back, bringing with it one of the increasingly rare things in media: millions of people choosing to pay attention to the same thing at the same time.
AI won’t change that. Nobody wants a synthetic last-minute winner or a personalised Manchester derby. The inefficiency is rather the point.
What it will change is much of what happens around those 90 minutes. How fans find things, plan things, buy things and, increasingly, decide between things.
And that should interest media agencies, because if technology is starting to sit between attention and action, our job can’t simply be to deliver attention and hope for the best.
The journey matters as much as the audience
Take a fairly ordinary Premier League weekend. A fan might need a train, hotel, somewhere to eat, tickets or hospitality and, if children are involved, almost certainly something unnecessarily expensive from the club shop.
Today, those are separate searches and transactions. Increasingly, they won’t be.
Ask an AI to organise the weekend, and suddenly brands aren’t simply competing for the fan’s attention; they’re competing to be included in the answer.
That changes the media conversation. A brilliant hotel campaign doesn’t help much if the hotel can’t be surfaced when somebody asks for somewhere near the ground, or if its availability, reviews and pricing are impossible to make sense of.
Media agencies have traditionally obsessed over reaching the right person at the right moment. We may need to start worrying about whether our clients can actually make it into the consideration set in the first place.
This doesn’t belong in the search department
There will inevitably be a temptation to invent an acronym, create a specialist team and put all of this somewhere near SEO, but we should resist that.
The information informing an AI recommendation can come from almost anywhere: media coverage, reviews, social conversations, creators, websites, pricing, product information and what people are saying in communities.
Which makes it everybody’s problem. It also makes it a rather good agency problem.
Agencies sit across media, data, search, social, content and increasingly commerce. They can see connections that are harder to spot from inside an individual channel.
The opportunity isn’t necessarily to create another discipline. It’s to make the existing ones talk to each other.
Revolutionary stuff.
What other people say about you matters
Brands have always liked environments they can control. The website is correct… the brand film looks lovely… everyone has used the right shade of blue.
Unfortunately, the internet has never shown much respect for brand guidelines and AI makes that increasingly relevant.
When people ask about the best matchday experience, which brands are genuinely associated with football or where they should stay, the answer isn’t formed from the corporate ‘About Us’ page alone.
It is shaped by the messier mix of journalism, reviews, fan conversations, creator content, and general internet noise around a brand. For agencies, earned reputation therefore becomes part of the media picture in a much more practical way.
We should ask not only where a client appears, but what evidence exists elsewhere to support what we’re paying to tell people.
Turns out other people saying you’re brilliant remains rather more convincing than you saying it yourself.
Sponsorship needs to earn its way into the conversation
This also creates an interesting challenge for sponsorship. Football has never been short of logos – shirt, sleeves, boards, interview backdrops, content bumpers. If there is an available rectangle somewhere near a football pitch, somebody will eventually sell it. Unless it’s a hydration break, we all hope.
Visibility still matters, but the more information becomes easy to summarise, the more valuable distinctive stories become.
The best sponsorships already understand this. They give supporters something to participate in, laugh at, complain about, photograph or share. They create a reason for the partnership to travel beyond the media inventory that was originally bought.
Agencies should therefore be pushing clients harder on what their rights can do, rather than simply where their logo can appear.
If nobody would talk about the partnership without the paid media, perhaps there isn’t enough of an idea in it yet.
We should probably start measuring this stuff
Then there is measurement. We measure an extraordinary number of things in marketing, some considerably more useful than others. So adding another dashboard isn’t necessarily something I’d normally advocate.
But brands should at least know what happens when people ask AI about the categories they operate in. Does the brand appear? Who appears instead? What is it associated with? And, perhaps most interestingly, why?
For clubs, that could mean questions about hospitality, stadium tours or family matchdays. For sponsors, it might mean asking whether the connection they’re spending millions to create is actually visible beyond their own advertising.
Agencies can start testing those questions now. Not because there’s a perfect new metric waiting to be invented, but because establishing what the answers look like today gives us something to learn from tomorrow.
None of this requires us to predict what AI will look like in five years. I mean, we don’t even know what football will look like if Uncle Gianni finally gets the bullet.
The more useful response is what football has always done.
Look at the game in front of you, work out where the space is opening up and adapt.
Clubs will keep measuring points, sponsors will keep measuring exposure, brands will keep measuring awareness and media agencies just need to make sure we’re watching the rest of the pitch as well.
Jon Williams is CEO and founder of The Liberty Guild