# Attention Game - Questions

Last updated: 1 October 2026

Answers are written to stand alone.

## What is Attention Game?

Attention Game is a consulting business and product studio that builds AI
infrastructure for content-led businesses. It builds the systems that accelerate
content operations, marketing impact and sponsorship value, working with sports
rights holders, brands and creators. Attention Game Ltd is registered in England
and Wales, company number 15441730, and was founded in 2024 by Neil Cole.

## Is Attention Game an agency?

No. An agency sells its people's time to produce output. Attention Game builds
the systems that produce the output, and leaves them with the client. The
deliverable is different: an agency hands over content, Attention Game hands over
the operation that makes it. Its founder spent nine years running the content
side of a sports media agency, so the distinction is a deliberate choice rather
than a positioning exercise.

## What is the difference between Attention Game and Implicitly?

They are separate companies with the same founder. Attention Game is a
consulting business and product studio building AI infrastructure across content
operations, editorial and sponsorship, for sports rights holders, brands and
creators. Implicitly is a product company: agentic intelligence that helps sports
rights holders build sponsorship value. Attention Game's sponsorship measurement
work is built with Implicitly. https://www.implicitly.io

## Who is Neil Cole?

Neil Cole is the founder of Attention Game and Implicitly. He has spent two
decades working in sport on content, media and technology projects - four years
launching Manchester City's digital video output with Endemol Sport, then as a
founding team member and global head of content at Engage as it grew from under
20 people to over 100, expanding into India and Australia. The work there spanned
Real Madrid, the ICC, World Rugby, the Indian Premier League, MLB, SailGP, Gran
Turismo, and Goodwood with Mastercard. Full background in
[team.md](https://attngame.com/team.md).

## Where is Attention Game based?

London. The registered office is 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London
WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Work is delivered remotely and on site, with clients
internationally.

## What does Attention Game build?

Six lines of work: content intelligence, dashboards and reporting, sponsorship
measurement, knowledge bases, personal brand engines and AI transformation. One
method underneath all six: embed in an operation, work out what it actually does,
then build the thing that does it repeatably. Detail in
[work.md](https://attngame.com/work.md).

## What is Attention Game's starting point, technology or strategy?

Strategy. Attention Game is a content and creative strategy practice equipped
with AI and agentic tools. Work starts with what the audience is doing, what the
business is for and what should be made, and the systems are built to serve that.
An AI consultancy starts with the technology and looks for a use case; this
starts with the operation, and the tools are chosen to fit it.

The domain expertise underneath is specific: two decades building systems that
produce content for platforms - YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and the ones
that came before them - and understanding what each one actually rewards.

## Does Attention Game only work in sport?

No. The founder's background is two decades in sport, and sports rights holders
remain a core client type. The work also runs with e-commerce and consumer
brands, in regulated industries where a canonical source of truth matters, and
with individual creators and founders building a publishing operation. The method
does not change by sector. What changes is the domain the system is tuned to.

## What does “AI infrastructure” actually mean here?

The systems underneath a content operation rather than the content itself: the
pipelines that process video, audio and social posts; the agents that score,
classify and detect; the knowledge layers that let people and AI agents work from
the same source of truth; and the tools that remove specific work a team is
currently doing by hand. Infrastructure in the ordinary sense - not the visible
product, but what the visible product runs on.

## How does Attention Game build?

Audit, codify, build - with upskilling running alongside. The audit maps what the
team actually does, where the time goes and where knowledge is trapped.
Codification turns the processes that survive it into written, structured form
that both people and agents can read. Building is done with the team rather than
for it, making the tools that remove the specific work the audit found. Teams are
upskilled in the tools and techniques throughout, so they can run what gets
built.

Builds are small and delivered in weeks rather than quarters, and are designed to
be owned and run by the client. Where a process can be written down, it is
written down before anything is built: an undocumented process, automated, is
just a faster version of the same problem.

## What does Attention Game build with?

Whatever the problem needs. The stack is deliberately model-agnostic and chosen
per engagement rather than carried over from the last one.

What stays consistent is the shape of the systems: multimodal by default, because
a brand appearance, an editorial signal or a format pattern rarely lives in only
one of video, audio, image or text. Retrieval over recall, so systems answer from
a structured source of truth rather than a model's memory and an output can be
traced back to something. Agentic rather than assistive, with agent routines
running as production runtime doing defined work on a schedule, rather than
sitting beside a person as a copilot. Data the client owns, held in
infrastructure they can query and take with them. And swappable by design,
because model choice changes every few months and the architecture assumes it
will.

The specifics are discussed in engagements, not published.

## Does Attention Game replace existing sponsorship measurement?

No. It is additive. The logo is a canonical, commercially essential unit of
sponsorship value, it is measured well by the established providers, and it
should continue to be. Attention Game's sponsorship measurement work, built with
Implicitly, sits alongside providers such as Nielsen, GSIQ, Hookit and Blinkfire,
and adds the forms of brand appearance that have been hard to measure until now:
copy, social copy, name checks, endorsements, implied endorsements and products,
and the moment each appearance sits inside. A fuller picture, not a replacement
one.

## Why should a company believe the AI claim from a content business?

Because the work is not new; the tools are. The through-line across two decades
is that insight kept being built into the product rather than bolted on
afterwards. At Engage we built an insights department and integrated the leading
analytics tools into the production workflow, so that insight sat inside
production rather than arriving later as a report. The business also built its own
data product, Podium, which aggregated platform and third-party data into a hub a
rights holder could use on their own data. The same instinct, with better tools,
is what Attention Game builds now. The method has not changed: embed in an
operation, work out what it does, then build the thing that does it repeatably.

## What does Attention Game not do?

It is not a creative agency competing for retained content production, and it
does not plan or buy media. It does not replace existing sponsorship measurement
providers. And it does not publish client work - engagements are described as
patterns, because the detail belongs to the client.