Kate Johnson

And rather than getting to instantly share that news with the world via my Instagram or TikTok account, my teammates and I had to wait to see if the Olympic broadcasters and journalists would cover it.

Our story was entirely in their hands to tell or not.

Well, 20 years later, and all of this has changed.

In an instant, we have sports scores, match results, and news stories at our fingertips and on our phones the moment it happens.

And this is incredible.

But there's still a problem.

It's one thing to seek out the information you're looking for.

It's another thing entirely to stumble upon it.

The stumbling upon it goes like this.

You're scrolling through your social media feed, you see something that captures your attention, you click on it and poof, down the rabbit hole you go, you're locked in.

Well, this stumbling upon is what we in marketing call discoverability.

And for sports, it's the magic that fuels existing fans and captures new ones, pulling them in.

But while it's easier than ever to search for sports news on Instagram, TikTok or Google, the information that fans stumble upon, or rather discover, well, it's served up to us by algorithms.

They use historical data, fan interactions and what's trending, which mainly skews to men's sports.

Despite incredible talent, heated rivalries, and growing popularity, women's sports remain largely invisible in our daily content feeds.

And this has real-world implications.

I've spent nearly two decades in global sports and entertainment marketing, at IMG, at Visa, and now at Google, and I've seen firsthand how and why this happens.

So I want to unpack this with you all.

I want you to think about these technology platforms as massive digital libraries and the algorithms as the librarians.

They're great at organizing, indexing, and cataloging information, but here's the important bit.