A Risky Bet
Irony is officially dead.
The five largest US professional sports leagues are asking the government to crack down on sports bettors who harass players, team personnel and their families, ESPN reports.
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS and the unions representing their players sent a letter to regulators in 35 states and Washington, DC, on Tuesday requesting that any individual who engages in such harassment receive a lifetime ban from legal sportsbooks.
Cue a torrent of “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” memes shared by beleaguered sports fans, inundated in recent years with ads and sponsorships from sportsbooks, betting apps and prediction markets.
The floodgates were opened in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on sports betting. Nearly every state has since legalized gambling on sports. As a result, sports sponsorships from gambling companies surged. By 2025, researchers found that viewers were exposed to gambling logos or gambling ads every 13 seconds during an average US sports broadcast.
Maybe that relentless exposure – and all the gambling ad money flowing through pro sports – has something to do with MLB pitcher Lance McCullers Jr. hiring 24-hour security last year after an irate gambler threatened his 5-year-old daughter following a bad start on the mound.
“We carry all of the burden, all of the risk and danger that comes with the association to gambling,” says NBA player and National Basketball Players Association President Fred VanVleet. “It was one of those things that was just kind of thrown upon us, and I think everybody’s trying to figure out how to adjust to it.”
Building For Bots – Or Not
Publishers are split on how to react to the existential threat of AI search.
Some are transforming themselves into AI-powered information and data resources, according to Martin Schori, a former AI lead at Swedish publisher Aftonbladet. These pubs are prioritizing licensing deals and content aggregation while building their own AI search tools, he tells The Rebooting.
But other pubs, Schori says, are promoting their human creators as influencers and hyping the audience trust and industry relationships they’ve built over decades.
Most news publishers, though, are falling somewhere in between these two approaches, Schori says – which, he adds, probably won’t serve them well in the long run.
The choice confronting news publishers, according to The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey, is whether to “pursue a direct-to-consumer strategy or become an information supplier to AI interfaces.”
We can already see that tension in TIME’s effort to make its content AI readable and Axios’ sponsored content designed to influence AI responses.
Even invalid traffic detection services now say that some bot traffic should be considered valuable to advertisers – even though these same services historically demonetized publishers for having too much bot traffic.
So it looks like publishers have to decide: Are they going to create content for humans, for bots or both?
Rogue Agents
Setting aside the AI doom and hype cycle, one thing feels true about the state of AI technology for non-tech individuals: It’s getting a lot more annoying.
Over at 404 Media, Jason Koebler argues that agentic services are wreaking havoc on the inboxes of writers, including his own. “There are so many dumb people asking dumb AI agents to beg journalists for favorable coverage,” he writes.
(For the record, the AdExchanger team gets emails from self-identified AI agents, too, albeit not nearly as many. Mostly we hear from humans who are clearly prompting their messages.)
The AI bots – some unabashed, others undisclosed – also press for random linkbacks or client mentions in old news stories well past their prime. Ironically, that’s because AI search engines weigh those mentions heavily since the stories are original human productions.
Meanwhile, AI agents with account log-ins can end up deleting emails and company databases, greedily snapping up restaurant reservations, canceling flights and even giving up data or control over accounts to hackers.
Ostensibly, people using those agents want to accomplish said tasks. But right now, says Koebler, the infrastructure isn’t in place to do so safely and correctly – a small consolation for the humans they have not yet replaced.
But Wait! There’s More!
Marketers whose products have longer consideration cycles are using the AI-driven change in consumer search behavior to make the case for larger media budgets. [Digiday]
Good news and bad news for Cable TV: The industry might be hitting its floor. [Business Insider]
Companies that produce electronic shelf labels are trying to distance themselves from the specter of dynamic and personalized pricing. [Fortune]
The US Commerce Department has ordered Kalshi to stop tracking the price of AI compute. [Semafor]
Another day, another Sydney Sweeney ad controversy: Female sports stars are blasting the celebrity’s new hypersexualized ad for prediction market Novig as a setback for women in sports. [CNN]
Ratings for this season’s premiere of “60 Minutes” dropped 19% overall and 33% in the 25-to-54 demo compared to last year, which critics blame on changes made by new CBS News boss Bari Weiss. But at least one media pundit is blaming Nielsen’s recent change to its ratings methodology instead. [post]
You’re Hired!
Teads appoints Alex Underwood as managing director of North America and Alena Morris as SVP of client solutions and strategic product. [release]
Former Seedtag exec Mike Villalobos joins AI audio ad tech company Audion as CRO. [release]
Sneakers, shows and apparel retailer JD Sports names Mike Grimes as CMO. [Business of Fashion]
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