Driven by the controversy surrounding the 2022 World Cup held in Qatar, brands are steering away from the more traditional opportunities for awareness that sports provide and are rather looking to discard – or even quite openly subvert – the sports playbook.

The most notable cases include ‘The Forgotten Team’ - a partnership between MEO (Portugal’s top broadcaster), Amnesty International and dentsu, generating awareness about human rights abuse and raising funds for victim’s families with the creation of an electric yellow jersey inspired by the workers’ vests, which is up for consideration across a number of categories – and ‘Unbanned Armband’ a mod for EA Sports Fifa 23 videogames that makes it possible for players to wear the One Love armband that FIFA had banned national teams from using at the Qatar World Cup. This mod was created by All Out, a global NGO advocating for the rights of the global LGBTQIA+ community and is shortlisted in the Gaming category.

Personalization is the key to delivering meaningful customer experiences and garnering consumer engagement. In order to achieve true personalization, organizations need findable, transferable and interoperable data that can be propagated across channels, as well as a content engine that can respond to the demands dictated by the desire for 1:1 brand experiences.

The success rate of traditional, multi-year digital transformation programs was low and for years ‘hyper-personalization’ was a much talked about but seldom achieved ‘white whale’ chased by experience marketers, who were lacking excellence in either if not both of the two camps. A session held at the dentsu Beach House, featuring industry leaders from Reckitt and Salesforce discussed how now the combination of composable architectures and Generative AI is now enabling enterprises to move at the increasing pace of change and tooling them to make hyper-personalization a reality.​