Event Sponsorship to the Rescue?

AI is ruining digital marketing and giving event sponsorships another chance

Human jumping over a shark to get your attention

Commentary

Whenever I tell someone I don’t have a LinkedIn account, they look at me with a weird combination of disbelief and wonder. I quickly follow-up with a declaration that I don’t use any social media, which generally receives an “I wish I could do that” kind of response. Then, I make a point to say I was one of the first 5,000 people on LinkedIn and once loved it until it lost its way.

Why did I close my LinkedIn account and stop using social media? Well, to be honest, it’s the same reason I’m writing this. The content became too phony and self-promotional, the authenticity of the engagement was dis-intermediated by algorithms, while accomplishments and ability to connect with people offline was thrown away in favor of your ability to be a content factory for LinkedIn’s benefit online.

I’m here to talk about how the (promise of the) digital worlds we have created for ourselves are not a replacement for our offline life. The humanity of our digital experiences is being so stripped out that there are now real consequences for those who have always assumed the next digital technology innovation represents progress and will lead to better things.

For those who live in the “analog” world of event sponsorships that offer authentic opportunities for brands to engage with real human beings, the perspective I have to share here should be a breath of fresh air and a vindication of the value in-person event sponsorships have. This Substack post will arm you with the narrative and data you need to push back on marketing types who say they are putting more money into digital and cutting back on in-person event sponsorships, because it is more accountable when spent on digital properties. Spoiler alert: It is not.

Digital marketing has jumped the shark

"Jumping the shark" is an idiom that refers to a point where a creative work, especially a television show, has reached its peak and is starting to decline in quality or relevance. The phrase originated in 1977 when the TV show “Happy Days” had show star “Fonzie” water ski over a shark, in a desperate plea for attention as the show was losing its audience.

Because TV viewing has collapsed, brands have had no choice but to follow the audience, which typically means to various online places. Marketers thought this was great. They could target people more directly, using all the information gathered from online behavior (even without explicit permission or knowledge) and that would increase the efficacy of their spending. They would have an idea of who they were reaching - or precisely if using a Meta app - and have insight into views on ads, clicks on them, maybe even be able to track purchases, “the great white whale” for marketers seeking that always so elusive knowable ROI every corporate bean counter is pressuring them to achieve (without knowing it isn’t really possible).

While achieving this “marketing self-actualization” via digital spending might have been theoretically possible, the reality hasn’t quite turned out that way. As brand building and marketing KPIs have shifted from long-term value creation to near-term sales metrics under the pressure of an ROI-driven and obsessed economy, patience to build valuable long-term loyalty has been replaced with urgency to facilitate as many transactions as possible, in part driven by this dogmatic conviction that fully accountable marketing is possible with digital marketing endeavors.

This cult-like belief about how digital technologies can make marketing activities adhere to a “you put this in and get this out” formula, has landed us in a place where attention - at any cost - is the coin of the realm for those who follow this formulaic approach to marketing.

These days, brands are resorting to gimmickry and performative nonsense to get attention to facilitate transactions at scale. It has gotten so bad that real people are no longer engaging with disingenuous attempts at getting attention. Even authentic ones are being tuned out because people think real is fake. Wait until you see the metrics that back this up a little later in this post. They are eye-watering.

Digital marketing is now all about shark jumping, not like in one episode of a series, but in every scene of every episode of every series. The problem is the term was invented to describe an act of desperation that everyone understands as kind of sad and pathetic. What we are talking about here is an entire industry - one taking in billions of dollars annually - not being taken seriously by the people that industry is generating all that money to impact. It would be quite disruptive if the consensus became that digital marketing is mostly worthless and collapsing on the weight of its own hubris.

A cautionary tale

One of the first stories on this Substack was a cool one about how a sports supplement brand called Yolked sponsored a 7v7 Football tournament for very little money and got millions of TikTok views on its product. Yolked did see sales increases from this campaign, but what if the numbers of real users seeing videos featuring Yolked was actually over-inflated? What if half of them were the product of AI bots, not real people viewing those videos? TikTok tries to prevent fake engagement, but it can’t fully control how many bots are “watching” its videos.

This past week, I came across a couple of different pieces of data that made me go “hmmmm….”

What if it turns out a significant amount of money being pumped into digital marketing - and away from traditional event sponsorships - is being wasted because it’s being spent on bullshit? Bullshit content sites. Bullshit engagement. Bullshit metrics.

What if it turns out the only way to get authentic engagement - and accurate metrics - is to be a sponsor of physical activities that reach live human beings? I believe the information and support exists to say not only could this be the case, but we are already here in that place.

The dream becomes a nightmare

How many times have you heard a brand decision maker say ‘we’re shifting our marketing spend to digital because it can be tracked and offers more accountability than event sponsorship that’s so ambiguous and costs money for activation.” Or some derivation of that?

The promise of digital advertising has been that it allows behavior to be tracked and therefore measured. Since most people don’t buy things right away when they see ads, getting an understanding of how many views/listens content gets has been considered the best way to measure how many people might have consumed a digital message. That is all good when the data being collected is the product of actual human behavior. Ever since Twitter had fake user accounts, advertisers had to be leery that they could in fact reach as many people as the number of users Twitter claimed to have.

But now, the problem has gotten out of hand. There are two relatively new forces, both enabled by the development of AI, that are creating separate, but related issues for digital advertising efficacy. To be blunt, advertisers are getting ripped off, as large portions of their ad spend are buying fully fabricated digital interactions. IOW, it is now the case that live event sponsorship offers the only full-proof way to pay for engagement opportunities that reach only 100% real humans.

Slop Sites

Or “Made For Advertising” (MFA) sites have increased in number by 717% over the last 12 months. These AI-generated websites slam together bogus or low quality content designed to get picked up by search engines so when people search, they get driven to these sites that are plugged into ad networks. Their entire purpose is to get paid for ad views, without any concern for content quality or accuracy. The brands that turn down your event sponsorship opportunities because “digital is more accountable,” are paying for these garbage views. So the opportunity cost is impressive: brands get a fraction of the value they are paying to get, and local communities are deprived of connective events that strengthen them economically and socially.

According to Deepsee.io data shared with Digiday, its platform’s block list of MFA and AI Slop was 17,124 domains long in June 2024. As of May 2025, it was 108,270 domains long; of those, 96,791 domains were classified as AI slop. Rocky Moss, co-founder and CEO of Deepsee.io, stressed that “these figures are likely conservative."

And it gets even worse.

AI Queries

Unless you are really falling behind the times, you are certainly aware of how much less you use legacy Google search now, compared to your favorite AI chatbot. We still see websites, but certainly not nearly as many as we used to before AI chatbots started reading them and extracting data from them so we don’t have to view them ourselves. Perplexity is my favorite, and I see it is routinely “viewing” at least 8-10 websites as sources for my queries, but I am not visiting any of them.

According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, AI-driven bots now generate more than half of global internet traffic, and automated traffic has surpassed human activity for the first time. This highlights the scale of the issue and the challenge for ad networks to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated bots.

Ad tech companies have the ability to identify bot traffic and filter it out of traffic data in the interest of protecting advertisers, but what is the economic incentive to do so, really?

Digital engagement must be questioned

According to Buffer, Instagram’s median engagement rate dropped sharply from 2.94% in January 2024 to just 0.61% in January 2025. Rival IQ’s 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report also confirms that every major platform has seen engagement rates tumble, with Instagram down 16% and Facebook down 36% year over year.

This shift means that brands are now getting a fraction of the engagement they once did online, despite rising digital ad spend. The disconnect between reported engagement and actual human attention is exacerbated by the proliferation of low-quality, bot-driven sites and "AI slop," which further distorts metrics and misleads advertisers about the real impact of their campaigns, and nowAI traffic that is counted as human traffic for ad views, is further degrading digital advertising efficacy.

Digital ad folks might say “yes, there are a lot of bots, but you can’t fake clicks on ads!” While that might be true, and clicks do mean a human is participating in a call to action, look at those online engagement numbers! They SUCK!

The advertising industry did it to themselves

Ever since my first ad agency job, I have hated the advertising industry. Not because I don’t appreciate the creativity, but because of the mentality driving it. It has never been accountable, always been exploitive, and is full of entitlement and misplaced arrogance up and down the value chain from client, to agency, to creative, to media buying, to account management. I mean this is an industry that literally exists to barge into our lives without an invitation and forces us to listen to it without getting our permission first, so think about the lack of respect for others it breeds in its culture. Don’t want to hear me, I’ll scream at you louder!

I’ve also questioned the merits of using war terminology to describe the actions involved with acquiring customers. It’s one of the reasons I have always had a passion for sponsorship marketing - leverage off the affinity people have for things and be authentic about your brand. Have some values, tell a good story, provide me a good value, treat me with respect, be a good corporate citizen, and I’ll be loyal. You won’t have to beg for my attention and try to get me to do something on your timeline when I’m not ready to buy. I’ll know to find and buy from you when I’m ready.

For years, marketers have been turning away from event sponsorships and community activities, convinced that only digital campaigns - with their promise of perfect measurability - were a “responsible” use of promotional dollars, and because they are too lazy to implement multiple event marketing activations that will be more impactful than big media or digital campaigns. But now, as digital ad metrics collapse under the weight of bots, fraud, and audience burnout, brands are forced to ask: How much of our spend is just being wasted? Suddenly, the event sponsorships once dismissed as too unaccountable might actually be the most effective way to reach real customers.

The age of digital screaming - with disingenuous hooks to get attention and desperate calls to action - has lost its power. The industry is in a frenzy, jumping sharks just to get noticed, while audiences have tuned out in numbers that are quite telling. Half the traffic on digital ads is fake, and that number is only growing. It all adds up to the “measurable” digital world now being the least trustworthy channel of all.

This isn’t a call for all digital marketing to be abandoned in favor of event marketing. It is one to encourage more priority being put on spending dollars reaching people live, in-person, and associating brands with things people care about, particularly where they live and call home.

Event sponsorship sellers, start your engines!

Now, a note about sources

When this Substack was started, I was diligent about linking to sources, but the data shows hardly anyone clicks on the links in the stories, so I have dramatically cut back on inserting links into them. I could put a “sources section” at the bottom if there is demand for it, but it’s obviously more work and not something I want to do if nobody cares. I’m kind of operating on the assumption anyone can copy/paste a story’s text into their favorite AI tool and just ask it to validate the claims made.

Here, I did it for you with Perplexity right here: Perplexity vets this story for accuracy

Yes, the tone may be hyperbolic in some cases, but that’s really done to reflect my personality and - hopefully - make the stories interesting to read. I don’t think we want to read antiseptic, AI-written posts with no color and imagination, no room for sarcasm, and irreverence. I think we want to be informed, entertained, and know a person is behind the story we are reading!