By Brad Rees, CEO, Mediacells
The footie World Cup seems like a long way off but the biggest-ever edition of this global sports phenomenon will be here before we know it.
It’s going to, literally, be huge.
A record-breaking 104 games, featuring 48 teams, played across 16 host cities in three countries: Canada, Mexico and the United States.
If the 2010 tournament in South Africa was the ‘Twitter Tournament’, then the trademarked 2026 event will be the AI World Cup – and we won’t even be aware of it.
The induction of tech to our daily lives, everything from face recognition, weather forecasts, electric cars to electronic line calling at Wimbledon all have one thing in common; the needlessness of the human to intelligently operate the controls.
Meanwhile in 2026, content discovery will happen almost entirely through social media, in fact it is already the new standard and is transforming how audiences currently find stuff out.
Social media service Pinterest, for example, estimates 80% of ‘Pinners’ have found a new product or piece of content within the social media platform.
By June 2026, Gen Z will be nudged out of focus by their Gen Alpha siblings, the newest generation, who have been allowed screens as pacifiers, educators, entertainers since day one.
These diminutive, digital natives have voracious content appetites and expect spumes of personalised content, available at the speed of AI, content that resonates perfectly with them, at a rate humans cannot deliver against.
Just as the industrial revolution replaced the fundamental need for manual labour so AI will, among many other things, byte into the lunch of every video editor, media producer, planner, insights specialist, basically the entire manufacture of all content as we know it.
And it’s not just a couple of billion digital milksops calling the shots either.
The advertising and sponsorship community will be tasked by their brands to create and manage exponential volumes of bespoke posts, coruscating across multiple platforms on an intra daily basis.
It may all sound like the rantings of a misinformed AI evangelist and perhaps they are, but instant, super-targeted, hyper-curated AI content is happening right now.
As of yesterday (October 9, 2024) AI-powered platform Social Department landed in Los Angeles.
The start-up aims is to ‘revolutionize (sic) how networks, streamers, studios, and FAST channels approach social media marketing’.
The content production platform aims to ‘personalize (sic) at scale, create hundreds of tailored posts in minutes, not days’.
The content carries a consistent, on-brand voice and tone across Meta, Alphabet and Elon platforms, while engagement is ‘optimized (sic) with AI-driven insights’ to ensure bang for marketing buck.
A global rights holder’s content library can be absorbed by the machine and new life breathed into latent back catalogues.
For the same rights holder, who needs audience engagement in a live environment, say a sports provider, these new AI social producers claim real-time adaptation of promotional content that leans into trending topics and audience sentiment.
The attention economy just got shorter and bigger respectively and the future of entertainment discovery ain’t what it used to be.
By mid 2026 it is safe to assume that TV Guides, wallcharts, EPG recommendation engines will be as redundant as the agrarian fieldworkers of the 19th century, replaced by socialised, personalised and persistently high-quality promotional material that feeds off the material it is promoting in real time, while, that is, time is still real.
