SVG Sit-Down: IMG's Francois Westcombe Goes Inside IMG's Annual Digital Trends ReportMore-is-more is top trend as fans long to go deeper with favorite sports, clubs, athletesBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Wednesday, November 19, 2025 - 9:41 am
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Today, IMG released its Digital Trends Report for 2026, and, as always, it's chock-full of insights and information about where the industry is, where it's headed, and how best to prepare to meet the needs of sports fans in 2026. This year's edition crowns YouTube as the sports industry's priority platform for the second year running, because of its ability to reach new audiences across a variety of media formats, drive revenue, and deliver audience analytics; it's followed by Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Spotify's debut on the list recognizes the platform's potential for the sports industry and the increasing cultural crossover between sports and entertainment.
At Sportel last month, SVG caught up with IMG VP, Business Development, Digital, Francois Westcombe to discuss current trends, how to get the most out of a digital strategy, and much more. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation. To download this year's report, click here.
IMG's Francois Westcombe considers the focus on short-form content a bit of a myth, given the popularity of long-form content in the streaming world.
A lot of sports-media organizations and leagues and federations are starting to think globally, and a lot of that is because of digital distribution. Is it important to still have a local digital presence rather than serving fans from thousands of miles away and from a different country or continent?
One of the themes in our trends report is that, yes, you can translate content, and technology is advancing at such a pace that you can translate content very easily. But what that technology doesn't offer at this stage is that human instinct, the local nuances, and cultural components, which are critical to creating content that resonates with people and is truly authentic to the markets and the audiences that you're trying to serve. For example, we partner with the NHL across seven different markets. We can localize that content for those markets and ensure that those fans feel like they're being heard -rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. It's very difficult for AI to pick up on local trends, so you still need humans to identify stories and jump on them. That's what we at IMG are able to do.
Last year, you and I discussed the move toward personalization and customization. Generative AI continues to evolve very rapidly to help meet that need. How are you seeing personalization evolving?
There is definitely a shift away from search-engine optimization towards generative-engine optimization. We're not saying that search is entirely dead, but, if you look at the way that we are used to consuming sports content online, it used to be self-serving. You would search for it, browse for it, and use apps for it.
But we're entering this new age of agentic browsing, which is all driven by automated platforms and generative engines discovering content for you. Sports properties are going to have to adapt to the way those engines operate, and that means we at IMG have to try new models and become the authoritative voice on those search engines for our clients. I think it's going to become much more complex for sports properties to be the first result when people are searching for content.
Along with personalization, there's the movement towards more and more because organizations need to reach more platforms with more styles and more forms of content.
The platforms, the audiences, and the partners that sports properties are working with are all demanding much more content. Often, rightsholders are having to produce more with less, and that's not easy. It's about being smart around content operations and having a deep understanding of content performance. Why are we creating a piece of content? Is it performing? Do we need to keep it? Do we need to iterate it or change it in the future? Or is the return on investment good enough, or do we need to drive resource and investment elsewhere to create more-compelling content?
Does more means more mean just create as much content as you can and then use digital to get the content out to fans and viewers?
Rightsholders have to be smart about where they're distributing content, and that also means holding back some content for their own platforms. It's about having a smart media mix that's nuanced from one partner to the other, and also leaning on content creators to be good partners who will amplify your message.
We've seen quite a few properties expand and collaborate with entities and brands, and some of them technically sit outside the sports arena, like fashion and culture. I think we'll continue to see more of those collaborations and more organizations getting smarter with those rather than just having an ad hoc partnership.
Remember that athletes have huge drawing power as well and the way sports properties can harness the power of the athlete is important. We did some great work with the Badminton World Federation on enhancing the storytelling capabilities and the digital brands of some of their athletes and building them into the stars of tomorrow. That has been a powerful vehicle for badminton to build audiences on a global basis.
How is IMG looking to leverage generative AI?
I'm not able to go into all the detail, but we've got teams looking into it. And our teams on the content side, who run social-media channels and create content, are looking at existing platforms [for their needs]. Generative AI will save sports propertie
