Professional sports organizations have become media companies, but they’re running on infrastructure that was never built for media-company scale. Sponsor renewals, fan engagement, partnership sales and proof of performance all run through the content operation, and the operating infrastructure can’t keep up.
Consider this: top-tier franchises now manage 80 to 150+ brand partners and publish across 13+ owned channels at a posting cadence 13x the cross-industry average, all with four-to-10-person creative teams.
To address this, Stagwell’s Code and Theory today announced the Content Operating System for Sports – an intelligent content operating system purpose-built for sports organizations. Powered by Adobe CX Enterprise, the solution gives teams and leagues a single managed system to meet content obligations at portfolio scale: on-brand, rights-cleared and informed by performance at every step.
The solution addresses three structural mismatches in sports content operations today: volume demands outpace team capacity, governance can’t keep pace with publish windows, and what worked last season isn’t captured in any system that informs the next.
The Content Operating System for Sports places intelligence and governance at the point of creation. It generates content from real triggers, sponsor obligation windows, fan segment behavior, game moments, and fixture events, rather than from a blank brief.
The result: sponsor obligations get fulfilled across the entire portfolio, fan content reflects who fans actually are and game-day reactions move from being a herculean effort to simply being an operational rhythm.
The Content Operating System for Sports leverages Adobe’s CX Enterprise technologies including Adobe GenStudio, which powers the agentic content supply chain-enabling Adobe and third-party agents to create, assemble, and optimize content at scale, configured for sports, through a data framework that structures content operations for the speed of sports. Its engine is a workflow library tuned to the sports content cadence of sponsor activation, fan engagement and team localization. The Content Operating System for Sports also leverages Adobe CX Analytics to deliver actionable insights for optimizing campaigns, targeting the right audiences, and connecting every media touchpoint to ROI.
Code and Theory operates the system alongside the customer’s in-house team. A small, dedicated group of full-stack, AI-fluent engineers embeds inside the customer’s organization to run and continuously refine the system day-to-day: strategy, technology and sports domain expertise — all in one team. The customer gets infrastructure that improves season after season rather than a deployment that gets handed off after launch.
The Content Operating System for Sports is the second solution between Code and Theory and Adobe’s Partner Solutions group. The first, the Creative Intelligence System, brings customer intelligence into the creative process early so teams can test and refine messaging and concepts before work is finalized and released.
Michael Treff, CEO of Code and Theory, says: “Code and Theory has spent more than a decade inside professional sports organizations, learning how this work operates at portfolio scale. The Content Operating System for Sports productizes that work, and the Adobe partnership is what lets us deliver it as durable infrastructure rather than another engagement. We’re committing to operate alongside our customers season after season.”
