The Attention Shift

This week, Ed sits down with Sam Houlding, MD of B2B at Spotlight Sports Group. They unpack Spotlight Sports Group's "The Horse Racing Audience Opportunity" report, and horse racing's 200 million untapped fan opportunity. They get into why the sport has a product problem that isn't really about the product, the F1 playbook the sport could follow, what Melbourne Cup and Smart View are getting right...

This week, Ed sits down with Andy Marston, now the permanent co-host of the show. They unpack Tennis Australia's new partnership with the PGA Tour to deliver the 2028 Presidents Cup, Forbes' 2026 Top Creators list showing the top 50 hit $1 billion for the first time ever, Wimbledon's new BBC deal and the IBM AI features that follow, Meta's parallel plan to build and buy its way into prediction mar...

The Attention Shift is a weekly news roundup covering sport, media, culture and the creator economy. Each episode Ed Abis is joined by a rotating co-host or industry guest to break down the stories shaping how the industry works now, built for senior sports and media professionals. This week Ed sits down with Andy Marston of Sports Pundit. They unpack the launch of Andy and Jamie Murray's new YouT...

The Attention Shift is a weekly news roundup covering sport, media, culture and the creator economy. Each episode Ed Abis is joined by a rotating co-host or industry guest to break down the stories shaping how the industry works now, built for senior sports and media professionals. This week Ed sits down with Rich Johnson. They unpack the BBC Sport app's record-breaking World Cup engagement number...

This week Ed sits down with Rory Natkiel, founder of Box Count and Chair of the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum. They unpack the Sponsorship Effect, the largest analysis of sponsorship effectiveness ever done, with 92 case studies coded to IPA standards. The 3 to 1 gap between the top 30% of sponsorships and the rest. Why the industry has been measuring the wrong things for decades. Why live sport...

The Attention Shift is a weekly news roundup covering sport, media, culture and the creator economy. Each episode Ed Abis is joined by a rotating co-host or industry guest to break down the stories shaping how the industry works now, built for senior sports and media professionals. This week Ed sits down with Harry Macey from Dizplai. They unpack Starmer's blanket ban on social media for under-16s...

The Attention Shift is a weekly news roundup covering sport, media, culture and the creator economy. Each episode Ed Abis is joined by a rotating co-host to break down five stories shaping how the industry works now, built for senior sports and media professionals. This week Ed sits down with Ellie Walter from Dizplai. They unpack Premier Padel and Red Bull's new mobile game Court Legends, designe...

Seb Losardo is the YouTube strategist behind 10 billion views. His client roster at Grow Media Club includes WillNE, John Nellis, Quadrant, Billy Wingrove, Laura Woods, and The Switch with Kevin Pietersen, collectively pulling 700 million views every month. Featured in Humble&Brag's 13 Best YouTube Strategists in the World as "The Professionaliser", he's the strategist who took YouTube from cr...

Joe Edwards, Marketing Director at Dizplai joins Ed for this week's news episode, stepping in as the first of several rotating Dizplai guest co-hosts. The five stories on the table all circle the same question: who actually owns the fan? From KSI walking away from the Sidemen to FIFA trying to identify every fan in a stadium, this week's news cycle is about identification, value exchange and the l...

Esteban Gonzalez joined FIBA in 2015 on a three-month internship. Eleven years later, he's the Senior Digital Content Manager for FIBA 3x3 — a sport with 10 million followers, 1.1 billion video views and over $220M in media value generated for sponsors in 2025 alone. It's also the fastest sport ever to reach the Olympics — just five years from pro circuit launch to Olympic discipline. In this epis...

In May 2026, five of the biggest media companies in America stood on a stage in New York and explained how they plan to make money for the next 12 months. YouTube declared itself TV. Disney pitched fandom. Fox did the opposite of everyone else. The 2026 upfronts didn't reveal one winner; they revealed five completely different bets on the next decade of media. Ed and Jo unpack the five biggest upf...

A two-time major champion just told reporters he'd rather grow his YouTube channel than go back to the PGA Tour. Bryson DeChambeau wants to play "tournaments that want him", and treats his 2.6 million-subscriber channel as the long-term career play. The player-as-creator thesis just went mainstream. That's one of five stories Ed and Jo unpack this week. TikTok has hired Issa Rae's Hoorae Media to...

This week, Jo is joined by Robbie Spargo, Co-Managing Director at Little Dot Studios, one of the UK's leading social media and content agencies with nine billion organic views flowing through their network every month. They cover where fandom is being built, why average view duration has overtaken raw views as the metric that matters, and what social commerce means for sports organisations trying...

The fund that spent $5BN trying to build a global golf league just stopped writing the cheques. PIF is ending direct funding of LIV Golf after 2026. The biggest sovereign wealth fund in sport just proved what every other backer already knew, you can't buy fandom on a tech-style timeline. That's one of five strategic bets Ed and Jo unpack this week. Adidas is selling anime, not boots, six weeks out...

The man who tried to build the European Super League just launched a fund that won't touch football. Andrea Agnelli is putting €100m into basketball, cricket, hockey and rugby instead. The most plugged-in operator in the sport thinks the valuation has peaked. That's one of three strategic bets Ed and Jo unpack this week. Marc Jacobs has stopped making ads and started making a Rachel Sennett-fronte...

In this episode of The Attention Shift, Ed sits down with Chris Sice, Chief Content Officer of the ICONS Series, to explore how a golf tournament played by elite athletes from other sports has become one of the most compelling challenger sports brands in the world. From building a distribution network across 25 publisher partnerships, to achieving a 49.8% interaction rate through the audience enga...

Description: In this episode of The Attention Shift, Ed and Jo dissect Gary Neville's seven figure acquisition of Mark Goldbridge's YouTube channels, ask whether you can actually buy an engaged community, and explore what it means for fan creator consolidation across sport. From UEFA quietly exploring a Champions League direct to consumer pilot, to Sky commercialising Soccer Saturday for the first...

Justin Bieber performed for millions who weren't at Coachella through YouTube's live stream, engaging with fans in real time across seven simultaneous stages. The Nashville Predators have made every game free on a brand new local TV station, no subscription, no cable package. Golf's biggest YouTube creators have stopped competing against each other and launched a unified network selling sponsorshi...

Nearly 90% of sports organisations are seeing flat or declining revenue. The average rights holder can only identify 24% of their fanbase. And most are spending third party investment on athletes rather than the data infrastructure that could save them. Ben Wells, founder of PTI Digital and author of the Sports Leadership Benchmark, joins Ed to break down why the sports industry's revenue model is...

The NFL just gave 32 clubs permission to become media companies. Social as owned media, highlights on TikTok, in-game content now sponsorable, and clubs can now sell original content directly to streamers. All landing right before the league renegotiates its entire media deal. OpenAI has acquired a daily live tech show that previously covered them as a subject. DAZN has launched a global creator p...

YouTube has launched an AI tool that lets brands find creators across three million channels with a single sentence. No agency, no brief. Tubi are running free creator-led alt-casts of every F1 race in 2026 alongside Apple TV, turning free access into a fan acquisition funnel. And the Savannah Bananas have made creator distribution an official rights tier, sitting alongside ESPN and the CW. Once o...

This week Ed is joined by Phill Agnew, behavioural scientist and host of the UK's number one marketing podcast, Nudge. Together they unpack the findings from the Impulse Lab, Dizplai's flagship research into the psychological triggers that drive live shopping conversions. Why is interruption failing? Why do countdown timers rank dead last as a purchase trigger? And why do story-first buyers feel b...

We're back with five stories in thirty minutes across media, culture and the creator economy. Tubi and TikTok have formalised a pipeline to turn short form creators into TV showmakers, but does a production structure kill the very thing that made them? Peacock has rebuilt its app to scroll like TikTok and during the Winter Olympics, one in five short clip viewers converted into live stream audienc...

In this episode of The Attention Shift, Jo sits down with Joe Bennett, Managing Director of Buzz16, to explore how sports content production has been turned inside out and what that means for everyone making content in 2026. Joe breaks down why pre-production is now the most underrated skill in the industry, what broadcast can steal from YouTube and vice versa, and why the generalist has become th...

We're back again with five stories in thirty minutes across media culture, the creator economy and sports. After ITV's Six Nations ad backlash, FIFA has doubled down, putting ads inside "hydration breaks" at the World Cup. Ed and Jo break down five stories from the week where sport and entertainment collided: in-match advertising, the New York Post's YouTube pivot, Major League Rugby's personality...