Amid Sports Chaos, ‘Known’ Data and Outcomes Help Agency Win

In a media landscape where sports keep winning upfronts and brands and broadcasters are only looking for more sports properties, entertainment agency Known is building its game plan and roster around the knowable.

This week, Known launches a campaign for clients CBS and Paramount+ built around reliability: playing variables like the accuracy of grocery store guacamole expiration dates and a party’s tolerance of Buffalo Bills Zubaz against the relative stability of NFL Sunday football broadcasts. Since forming when ​​marketing and data strategy firm Schireson Associates acquired brand strategy firm Blackbird and longtime Hollywood marketers Stun Creative in February 2020, Known has steadily built its expanding presence within sports’ increasingly reliable corner of the otherwise volatile media and entertainment spectrum.

Known’s principals point out that the agency has helped launch nine of the last 12 major streaming services—”If you put a + after ADWEEK, we’ll launch a streaming service for you, my friend,” said Known president and former Blackbird CEO Ross Martin—giving the agency a unique vantage point for changing media demands. From the depths of the pandemic to the present, Known has maintained longstanding relationships with leagues including the NFL, NBA, NASCAR, and the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL, as its media AOR); retailers including Dick’s Sporting Goods; and gaming companies including Penn Gaming.

“With entertainment being in our DNA and part of what we’ve done for the last two decades before Known was Known, we’ve worked with every league and every media company that covers those leagues,” said Mark Feldstein, president and partner at Known and founder of Stun Creative. “It comes from that place of being a storyteller, so we grew up in that space, and that’s what we’re one of the best at.”

This year, however, Known has gone on offense as more interest swirls around the sports space. It was just named strategy and creative AOR for UCLA athletics ahead of the upcoming football and fall sports seasons. With the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan looming, Known became the official strategy, creative, and media partner of the Stifel-sponsored U.S. Ski Team and the research and strategy house of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.

Known’s sports marketing strategy looks beyond short-term point scoring. Using the agency’s in-house suite of Skeptic AI apps to estimate viewership, capitalize on tune-in opportunity, and boost creative testing, it’s both tracking the evolution of sports-based campaigns and, through its production and design teams, turning advanced athlete scouting into original content like its upcoming Amazon Prime Video documentary “Meal Ticket” about the McDonald’s All-American youth basketball games.

With a blend of veteran experience and new media knowledge, Known is attempting to build dynastic stability through its expanded sports strategy.

“We don’t spend millions on a fancy beach in Cannes, we don’t issue press releases for fake initiatives that don’t exist, and we don’t manage athletes,” Martin said. “Sports at Known is something we’ve intentionally been keeping a little bit quiet because it’s such a loud, noisy category that we just went about building this business brick by brick, and we’ve done it from all sides of the ball… or the puck.”

Building the team

Known consists of just under 300 employees working across its various departments. Feldstein still serves as the head of its creative team, while its media planning and buying are headed by chief media officer and former Universal McCann exec Kasha Cacy. All of them serve alongside a sizable research and data science team driving the agency’s analytics and overseen by Known CEO Kern Schireson.

On the whole, 85% of the agency’s revenue still comes from within the United States, and some of its biggest partners include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and numerous entertainment and streaming companies. Within that mix, however, are brands, broadcasters, cable networks, and streamers with media and strategy relationships with Known that predate its formation.

As Feldstein points out, at the agencies that became Known and at Known itself, his teams have worked on Olympic campaigns, campaigns for the MLB Shop and NFL, campaigns for Hulu + Live TV with Jimmy Butler, and brand campaigns for Beyond Meat and Audible featuring athletes like Kyrie Irving and Russell Wilson. 

“These are relationships that have been in place for, in some cases, decades,” Martin said. “Everyone’s rushing into sports right now, because it seems to be one of the only things that’s working—sports won the upfront when nobody won the upfront—but this is not new to Known, so we’ve been riding that wave as it crests.” 

Playing like you’ve been there before can earn you fans in sports marketing. Known became the creative AOR for the Stifel-sponsored U.S. Ski Team with a recommendation from a former client, who just happened to be the CMO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboarding Team. 

“That relationship is so important, as with any of these partnerships, when you have a sponsor,” Feldstein said. “The fact that we come to it now with that connection on both sides makes the relationship, the process, and the chances of success even better, because we have an understanding and a comfort level.”

Knowing the unknown

With more crowded, contentious fields in both sports and sports marketing, Known is attempting to eliminate some of the late-game surprises from the process.

The company’s Skeptic AI technology, for example, offers clients 65 to 70 apps to build audiences, make predictions, test messages, create new versions of existing creative, or even talk to proxies of consumers. It ran more than 100 different scenarios for Known’s latest campaign with the NFL and CBS/Paramount+ and is throwing even more effort at adtech’s most elusive goal—eliminating guesswork. 

“It doesn’t do our creative for us. It doesn’t do our media for us—we have incredible Tony Starks inside that Iron Man suit—but it allows us to be far more efficient and effective and predictive and precise for all of our clients,” Martin said. “That is especially true in sports, where it matters right now because these leagues are growing quickly. There’s so much investment flowing into them, and so many brands counting on them to succeed.”

But just as Known did when it helped turn one man’s Ocean Spray-drenched longboard ride into a TikTok spot, it has its team paying as much attention to the human element of the game as it does to the stats. In creating its documentary about the McDonald’s All-American games, Known learned that the games’ players had a 70% greater chance at making the NBA or WNBA than their contemporaries. It also received a years-long, up-close look at developing stars, including former Duke star and current Dallas Maverick Dereck Lively II, USC star JuJu Watkins, and LSU star and national champion Flau’jae Johnson.

It took greater interest in player development and narratives that not only led it to UCLA, but also fueled its investments in the Religion of Sports production company funded by Tom Brady, Michael Strahan, and Gotham Chopra, while piquing its financial interests in athlete-supported investment platform Stackwell Capital.

“Everything we do is pushing towards a desired action and outcome,” Feldstein said. “So we know how to drive those actions that are needed.”