The World Cup 2026 seems like a long way off but the biggest-ever edition of the global sporting showpiece will be here sooner than we think.
It’s going to be, literally, huge with 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 World Cup’ then FIFA ’26 will be the AI World Cup and we won’t even be aware of it.
The induction of tech to our daily lives; face recognition, weather forecasts, electric cars and now line judges at Wimbledon are to disappear after 147 years as the All England Club adopts electronic line calling from 2025.
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 find entertainment.
Pinterest, for example, estimates 80% of ‘Pinners’ have found a new product or piece of content on 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 and as entertainers.
These diminutive, digital natives have voracious content appetites and expect spumes of personalised content, available at the speed of AI, content that lands with ever-diversifying audiences at a rate that Gen X and Gen Z humans simply cannot deliver.
Just as the industrial revolution replaced the fundamental need for manual labourer 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 entire advertising and sponsorship community, whose brands will demand the creation and management of exponential volumes of bespoke posts, coruscating across multiple platforms, intra daily.
It may all sound like the rantings of a misinformed AI evangelist and perhaps it is but this is already happening right now, as of today (October 9, 2024) with the arrival of Social Department, an AI-powered platform whose aim 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’ with a consistent brand voice, maintaining a unique, on-brand tone across Meta, Alphabet and Elon touchpoints.
Engagement will be ‘optimized (sic) with AI-driven insights’ to ensure bang for buck.
For a global sports rights holder with an extensive content library, as long as the assets are imbibed by Social Dept, they pledge to ‘breathe new life into your existing content catalog (sic)’.
For a global sports rights holder who needs audience engagement to happen in a live match environment, the social producers claim real-time adaptation of promotional content that leans into trending topics and audience excitement.
The attention economy just got shorter and bigger respectively and the future of entertainment discovery ain’t what it used to be. TV Guides, wallcharts, EPG recommendation engines are being replaced by socialised, personalised and persistently high quality promotional material that feeds off the content it is promoting.