The future of sports marketing is ?

As a member of the sports marketing industry, we've been talking about teams as publishers for several years now. However, with the barriers of distribution and audience acquisition taken care of at the platform level, what's holding any team back from executing on an always-on content strategy for their sponsors?

The economics of teams allow them to play the social game by entirely different rules and even more interesting, the rules teams have in competing for an audience on these channels. Teams have metrics that allow them to sell tickets and a broader vision no matter what channel it is on, while sponsors need to drive you back to their .com to sell you something or sell an ad against your impression.

Whatever new formats evolve to serve the social space, they're going to need to be simple enough that advertisers can just buy them without too much thought.

When will teams learn that users will not endlessly stand for the archaic ad models built around print, Radio and TV? The line between entertainment and marketing no longer exists and we must embrace a system that rewards brands and technologies that empower users and deliver a superior experience while still effectively monetizing their content and increasing their revenues.

I think the future of display is going to be difficult for sports teams because as the total available inventory increases exponentially through social media channels, CPMs across networks and even premium sites are going to drop, forcing their sponsors to go even more cross-platform with their marketing executions in order to win the display business.

But instead of getting creative many teams are going in the opposite direction. A recent study conducted by the independent agency trading desk Accordant’s  found that only 29% of the biddable sports inventory made available during the second quarter disclosed whether the ads were viewable, down from 32% in the first quarter, and down from about 40% in prior quarters.

The finding, that comes as media buyers are pushing to make “viewability” –-- the industry standard for online advertising, indicates that at least for the short run, some teams are actually making that harder to discern by not making data about the viewability of their ads available when they are bought.

In simple terms the trend data shows that teams are actually moving in the opposite direction introducing so-called “attribution models” that advertisers and agencies use to determine what parts of their online campaigns actually generated results from users.

If sponsors stop buying inventory from teams who fail to disclose the effectiveness of their sports buy, and the average performance of the ads they do buy declines, where does that leave us?