This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.

Sports fans have no problem finding programming focused on the men’s game. Beyond the games and matches themselves, there’s The Last Dance for basketball enthusiasts, Hard Knocks for football fanatics, and Welcome to Wrexham for fans of English football, to name only a few.

Allyson Davis and Melissa Forman know it well. The two media execs spent years working at Fox Sports, as well as years at other brands and media companies like Red Bull and MTV, long before women’s sports docs like Full Court Press or In the Arena: Serena Williams were available to viewers.

“There’s this disconnect between what the platforms think that fans want and what the fans really want,” Davis told Marketing Brew.

In 2022, Davis and Forman set out to address that disconnect, founding Impakt Partners, a media company focused on producing, marketing, and distributing programming about women’s sports.

“We want to do something that matters at this point in our careers,” Davis said. “Men’s sports, they’re fine. They don’t need us anymore. We’ve done a great job for all those men. Let’s do it for the women now.”

Continue reading here.—AM

It’s true that Google, the world’s largest advertising company, can see nearly every ad dollar and impression that moves through the digital ecosystem.

But that alone doesn’t constitute a monopoly, the company’s lawyers argued on the first day of its defense last Friday.

Google brought its arguments to a close last week, finishing off three weeks of testimony from both the advertising giant and the Department of Justice, which has alleged that Google has engaged in anticompetitive behavior and monopolistic practices in the ad-tech sector. Now, the industry waits: closing arguments won’t be held until right before Thanksgiving, so don’t expect a ruling until after that.

The DOJ, which rested its case before Google began its own, spent two weeks sharing hours of expert testimony and introducing into evidence endlessly quotable emails from Google executives describing their views on the company’s increasingly powerful position in the ad-tech ecosystem.

“If we execute…we’ll be able to crush other networks, and that’s our goal,” David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of global display advertising, was quoted as saying in an internal note shared with Google employees in 2009.

The DOJ focused on arguing that Google used its foothold in the ad-tech market to maintain a “trifecta of monopolies,” DOJ attorney Julia Tarver Wood said in opening statements. Google, meanwhile, argued that it faces plenty of competition and that its business decisions that the DOJ has characterized as anticompetitive are intended to create a safer ecosystem for its users.

Read more here.—RB

The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on companies making big claims about AI.

Last Wednesday, the FTC announced cases against four businesses the commission claims made “allegedly deceptive claims about AI-driven services” to market and sell their businesses. In addition, the FTC announced a settlement with another company that allowed users to create fake customer reviews using GenAI tools.

The batch of cases, part of an enforcement strategy dubbed Operation AI Comply—which is totally not a cheesy Steven Seagal flick—involves three companies that the FTC alleges promised profitable digital storefronts that never materialized. The commission also settled a case with the company DoNotPay, which offered legal services but, according to an FTC complaint, “did not conduct testing to determine whether its AI chatbot’s output was equal to the level of a human lawyer” and didn’t hire or retain attorneys.

“Some marketers can’t resist taking advantage of that by using the language of AI and technology to try to make it seem like their products or services deliver all the answers,” Julia Solomon Ensor, an attorney in the enforcement division of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote in a blog post announcing the cases.

The FTC also announced that AI writing company Rytr agreed to a proposed settlement over claims it sold a tool that it said could write and publish fake customer reviews for businesses. The proposed order “would bar the company from advertising, promoting, marketing, or selling any service dedicated to—or promoted as—generating consumer reviews or testimonials” in the future, according to a press release announcing the cases.

Continue reading here.—RB

Better together. Instead of going all in on streaming, new data from Marketing Architects suggests there’s a better way to make TV work: using both linear and connected TV. Learn more about this all-inclusive approach at Marketing Architects’ webinar with Adweek on the future of TV advertising. Register today.

Executive moves across the industry.

• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati resigned from the company, the latest in a string of high-profile departures.
• NBC Today co-anchor Hoda Kotb will depart the show early next year.
• Telemundo announced that Joaquin Duro will become executive VP of Telemundo Deportes, its sports division.