The Distribution Channel Everyone Forgets

👋 Welcome back to Sponcon Sports, a weekly newsletter dedicated to sponsored content strategy in the sports industry!

Major League Soccer Schedule Release Stats You NEED to Know.

📹 80% of teams (24 out of 30) produced a schedule release video.

🤝 50% of those videos (12 of 24) were sponsored.

⏯️ Two teams — Nashville SC and San Diego FC — didn’t have sponsored videos but did include partners in other schedule assets.

🖥️ 83% of teams (5 of 6) without a release video still had sponsored schedule assets.

🐄 15 Brands appeared across the league’s schedule release sponsorships.

🎟️ Ticketing was the top sponsorship category, leading the way with six deals — evenly split between Ticketmaster and SeatGeek.

🛫 Five categories tied with two deals each: Airline (Delta Air Lines, Sun Country Airlines), Auto (Carvana, Toyota), Energy (Shell Energy, American Electric Power), Financial (BMO), and Healthcare (Orlando Health, El Camino Health).

👑 Three teams — Atlanta United FC (Delta), Charlotte FC (Bojangles), and Chicago Fire FC (Carvana) — integrated partner product directly into their videos.

Charlotte’s execution was the standout. They built their video around a TikTok For You page concept and dropped in a co-branded Bojangles ad as the admin scrolled — a clever touch that perfectly mimicked the platform experience.

In Today’s Edition:

• Your Hidden Distribution Advantage 🥷

• LEGO Makes Its Way Downtown 🚘️ 

• Gemini’s Sphere Renewal News 🔮 

🏊️ DEEP DIVE
You’re Underusing Your Comms Team

Last week I spoke at Sports Business Journal’s Media Innovators event in New York City, joining Leanda Helms (VP, Creative & Content, Boston Celtics) and Jason Lavine (SVP, Brand Creative & Content Production, L.A. Chargers) for a panel on a topic I care about deeply: Monetizing sports content fans actually want.

Midway through the conversation, we were asked a question that rarely gets the attention it deserves:

As someone who spent six years in broadcast journalism and five more in PR agencies before working in sports, this is a question I’ve seen from every angle.

Today, I’m unpacking my full answer — and why I think the comms function is one of the most overlooked assets in building integrated digital partnership campaigns. More importantly, I’ll break down how teams can tap into that expertise to drive better storytelling, stronger reporting, and more impactful results for partners.

Comms: Your Hidden Distribution Engine

When teams think about integrated digital campaigns, the mental checklist usually starts with the usual suspects: organic social, paid social, email, web, app, SMS. Those channels matter — but they’re not the whole picture.

The most overlooked channel is the one that doesn’t act like a channel at all:
your communications team.

If the goal is to generate attention beyond your owned audience, you need earned media. And earned media offers something no other channel does:

• It’s free.

• It’s credible.

• It extends your reach far beyond your core fans.

Bringing comms into the process unlocks two immediate benefits:

Increased internal reach: Even your strongest digital channels rarely reach your full audience. Algorithms, timing, and platform behavior guarantee that a large portion of your owned followers or subscribers miss any given post.

Earned media creates “surround sound” around your campaign — another distribution layer that reinforces the message for your existing audience and introduces it to people who may not follow you at all. It becomes another touchpointto ensure the story is actually seen.

Increased partner value: Brands look for visibility they can’t easily generate themselves — similar to why they lean so heavily on digital integrations with teams. Sports properties come with built-in cultural relevance and a level of fan attention most brands simply don’t command.

Earned media is an extension of that same advantage. When your comms team integrates partners into pitches, releases, or story angles, they inherit that cultural lift. Sports stories break through more often than traditional brand stories—and your partners benefit directly from that credibility and expanded reach.

But the value of earned media isn’t just reach — it’s precision.

Earned Media’s Targeting Power

Looping in comms early lets you target audiences with far more specificity than most teams realize:

• Endemic sports outlets: where your most passionate fans live

• Trade publications: SBJ, FOS, Adweek, etc

• Culture and casual fan outlets: the places that shape mainstream attention

• Local vs. national/global: helping counter the perception that team partnerships lack broad reach

• Demographic-specific outlets: identity, interest, or lifestyle-based publications

And increasingly important: creators.

They’re the new media. If creators cover your team, sport, or category, pitching them is just as valuable as pitching a reporter. Their content can travel further — and faster — than a traditional outlet.

How Earned Creates Launch Stability

When you roll out a new content series or a first-of-its-kind idea, you don’t know how it’ll perform. It could take off. It could flop. It’s difficult to predict.

An earned media push builds in a performance floor.

If media is talking about a project before or as it launches, you start with momentum: attention, impressions, conversation, and validation. That early lift can stabilize launch performance and create perceived success even before numbers come in.

We saw this over the summer when the US Open announced a new reality dating series, Game Set, Matchmaker, taking place entirely at the event in partnership with Dobel Tequila and Moët & Chandon.

Earned Media Partners Can’t Replicate

Brands fight for earned coverage. Often, they struggle to get it.

Sports teams, on the other hand, are inherently newsworthy. That’s why integrating partners into pitches and releases creates outsized value:

• Their name appears in stories that matter

• They reach audiences they normally can’t

• Their executives see and feel the impact

• They “show up in culture” without added costs

Add a quote where appropriate, and the impact multiplies.

Six Steps To Maximize Comms Collaboration

Once you understand why comms matters, the next step is designing a process that lets them do their best work. Here’s how to do it.

1. Give Media a First Look With Unlisted YouTube Uploads

If your project includes long-form video or anything destined for YouTube, upload it unlisted during planning. That gives reporters early access under embargo — and early access leads to better, richer, more thoughtful coverage.

It also positions your project as something worth paying attention to.

2. Align Early on Creative That Will Live Inside the Press Release

If you plan to embed a social post or YouTube video in the release, the asset must be published when the release goes out. If not, it can’t be embedded into the release.

Is that a killer? No. It’s a missed opportunity. The post embed can help add more impressions, views, and engagement to the post.

This is where timing matters. If comms needs a 6 a.m. release, but your audience never engages at that hour, you have to negotiate the balance. Still images and unlisted links can be used if necessary — but the best version happens when social and comms align early so creative can be developed accordingly.

3. Create Ready-Made Assets for Media

Want coverage? Make it easy.

Provide 1–2 minutes of lightly edited B-roll that outlets can drop directly into their stories. TV and digital publishers rely on footage they can work with immediately. The easier you make their job, the more likely you are to get airtime.

4. Offer Interviews With the People Behind the Project

Interviews add depth, exclusivity, and narrative color. Depending on what you want to achieve, you can offer:

• Front office leaders: great for trades

• Creative or production staff: great for endemic and local outlets

• Talent or players: great for fan-facing and culture coverage

More access = more interest = more pickup.

5. Bring Your League Into the Loop

Your league is a media powerhouse. They have broadcast platforms, streaming shows, digital channels, studio programming — and all of it can amplify your work.

If they know what’s coming, they can:

• Share clips

• Feature interviews

• Air full segments

• Cross-promote across their channels

It’s an easy multiplier for distribution. Note: the same goes for your regional sports network (if applicable).

6. Involve Comms From Ideation Through Launch

The biggest unlock is also the simplest: comms needs to be there from day one.

Bringing them in early allows them to:

• Shape the angle and assess newsworthiness for your media targets

• Flag risk for the team or the brand

• Set pitch timing

• Establish asset deadlines

• Build earned media into the workback plan

• Ensure your launch sequencing actually maximizes reach

Earned media success is built at the start — not the end.

The Takeaway

If you want your digital partnership campaigns to break through, you can’t treat communications as an afterthought. You need them as a strategic partner — a distribution engine, a credibility builder, and a targeting mechanism that reaches far beyond your own channels.

The teams that integrate comms early don’t just get more coverage. They get smarter campaigns, stronger launches, happier partners, and more proof that their content actually matters.

🔍️ SPONCONSPIRATION
Steal These Ideas

Somehow LEGO and F1 keep finding fresh ways to reinvent the life-size LEGO car stunt. At the Las Vegas Grand Prix, they introdcued the cool-down car — unveiling a pink Cadillac and recreating the famous scene from 'White Chicks' by singing 'A Thousand Miles' with driver, Terry Crews.

Plenty of brands activated around the Las Vegas GP, but Google Gemini stole the show. To celebrate its McLaren partnership renewal, Google used AI to generate multiple reinterpretations of the team’s car — a perfect pairing of platform and partner, amplified by the most attention-grabbing screen on Earth.

Since we talked about how social media can drive additional value for sponsored promo items last week, the Buffalo Sabres deserve love for their Beer Sabre with Labatt. One fan’s tweet — later quoted by the team — racked up nearly 3.5M combined views.

Staying with in-venue experiences — this week I learned the Cleveland Cavaliers blast fake snow into the crowd for a “Cavalanche” whenever their Wendy’s Frosty trigger hits. It’s a ridiculous, memorable visual… and exactly the type of arena moment that translates beautifully into social content.

Another week, another YouTube win for the Philadelphia Eagles. This time they spotlighted Everything an NFL Equipment Team Does in a Week in partnership with Lincoln Financial. More proof that behind-the-scenes storytelling edited for the platform is still one of the most reliable formats.

Fanatics welcomed Paige Bueckers to the family with a trick-shot collab featuring the Hulett Brothers.

And shoutout to the Detroit Lions for going all-in on their Pet Supplies Plus corgi race - making it feel bigger than a one-off stadium activation. Cornerback Amik Robertson narrated the race preview hype video, and the team even turned its question-of-the-day into “Which corgi wins?” Detroit brought back their vote-to-win activation to further engage fans at Ford Field. The next day, they provided social coverage of the race.

🚨 ICYMI
What To Watch For

Best of 2025: ICYMI — here’s the replay of the Best Sponsored Social Media Campaigns of 2025 webinar I hosted with Zoomph’s Director of Marketing, Dan LaTorraca.

2026 Digital Trends: IMG dropped its annual digital trends report. They identified seven trends, but if you only read one, make it The Short Form Fallacy.

Audience Reality Check: Ed Abis broke down Stats Perform’s 2026 Fan Engagement Survey, highlighting five ways sports media is missing what fans actually want.

Less Is More: Nirupam Singh shared the three-experience filter Baller League used to turn down revenue — and still close Nike [Commerical Table Newsletter].

The Age Illusion: John WallStreet lays out why leagues don’t get younger on streamers — they just lose viewers.