Lewis Wiltshire, SVP and managing director of digital at IMG, took to the stage at the Digital Content Summit in London (10 June 2026) to share details of the organisation’s 2026 Digital Trends Report. Rather than simply identifying trends, this year’s report is notable for challenging a number of key assumptions, especially around the role of short-form content in attracting younger viewers.
Wiltshire highlighted three main themes: ‘More is more is more’, ‘main character energy’, and ‘the short form fallacy’.
When it comes to ‘more is more is more’, Wiltshire said: “I think challenging the status quo or challenging truisms in the sports industry is one of the main things that the IMG Digital Trends Report is there to do. This particular trend challenges the notion that I think has been pretty long held in our industry, that of quality over quantity. We’re not suggesting quantity over quality, we’re saying you have to be both.”
“There’s more competition for attention than ever before,” he continued, “and this old quaint notion that we need to protect the quality, we need to post less, but better content… well, good luck. There are hundreds of thousands of other posts going out in that very second.”
For sports organisations, an additional challenge is that audiences are no longer comparing a football club’s content with that of a rival club, for example. They are comparing it with everything else competing for attention on their screens.
“I think the sports industry is in greater competition with people not being interested in sports at all, and the minute that someone is interested enough to look at any of our content on their phone, they’re much more disproportionately likely to look at other sports content too.”
That reality puts pressure on creators to increase output despite finite resources, however Wiltshire was clear that while the challenge may be difficult, the market will not slow down to accommodate those unable to adapt. AI, however, could be part of the solution.
“We were well aware when we wrote this trend that it was provocative, that people don’t have unlimited budgets,” he said. “The reality is that this is what you have to try and achieve, and of course AI will enable you to cut some of the costs. It will certainly enable you to do reporting at scale in a more cost-efficient way. It can even help you to create content in a more cost-efficient way. That needs to be done carefully, but it can be used for that. We could talk about how it’s hard, but the attention economy is what it is, and that is the environment you’re operating in.”
The report also highlighted the growing importance of individuals over institutions, with the ‘main character energy’ trend identifying a continuing shift towards personality-driven media consumption. In sport, this is reflected in fans following athletes as much as, and sometimes more than, the teams they represent. This has become particularly visible in football, where star players often carry vast audiences with them when they move between clubs.
“People, to a great extent, have always been more interested in people than things, but I think that trend has accelerated in recent years due to the creator-led internet,” explained Wiltshire. “In sports, for sure, this is something that rights holders are going to have to get their heads around and think about how they’re leveraging that. What’s your creative strategy? How are you telling your organisation’s stories through individuals, whether that’s creators or maybe your own in-house creators.”
So, as ‘more is more is more’ is about winning attention, and ‘main character energy’ is about winning attention through people rather than institutions, the obvious next question becomes, what do we do with the attention once we’ve got it? This, said Wiltshire, is where the short-form fallacy comes in.
If one assumption has dominated sports content strategy in recent years, it is the belief that younger audiences only want short-form video. However, according to IMG, the evidence increasingly suggests that Gen Z does not reject long-form content. Instead, it rejects boring content.
The continued growth of streaming platforms, podcasts, gaming communities and YouTube consumption demonstrates that younger audiences are perfectly willing to invest significant amounts of time in content they find compelling. And, while short-form content excels at generating awareness, alone it does not create fandom.
“I don’t want to give you the impression that we don’t think short-form content is important. We see TikTok as enormously important, Instagram as enormously important, and Reels as an enormously important part of Instagram. We absolutely value short-form content, it’s a huge part of the mix, but we see it as top of funnel. It’s the classic marketing funnel. Short-form content will sit at the very top of that audience acquisition funnel, it is the best possible way to reach the widest possible group of existing or new fans. But to convert them, if you haven’t got the long-form content that converts them to deeper fandom, then you’re just going to be fishing around the top of that funnel.”
Wiltshire concluded by sharing IMG’s platform power rankings, with YouTube, Instagram and TikTok continuing to form the dominant trio.
“We think they’re the undisputed big three,” said Wiltshire. “But YouTube is a winner in so many different ways. It’s become the primary platform for long-form content, for short-form content, it allows monetisation really well – it stands out in the industry for that, for creators to monetise, organisations to monetise. We think YouTube rocks.”
