Author: Kimeko McCoy

After a three-year hiatus, Cheez-It has officially brought its mascot Prince Cheddward out of retirement in time for this year’s Citrus Bowl. As sports marketing gets more crowded, Cheez-It hopes its revived brand mascot will drum up enough fan nostalgia to drive more sales.

“He’s a fan-favorite asset who helps us stand out without needing to ‘out-spend’ or ‘out-shout’ anyone,” said Cara Tragseiler, senior brand director for Cheez-It. 

It’s increasingly necessary for brands to find new ways to break through the noise. This year, the WNBA set a league record with 46 official sponsors, including newcomers like Coach, Booking.com and Ally banking, according to Sports Business Journal. Even last year, 39% of marketers planned to increase their investment in large-scale sports sponsorships going into 2025, according to Forrester’s Q4 2024 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse survey.

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For publishers, disintermediation isn’t a one-off — it’s a pattern. 

Now, publishers are watching agentic AI browsers closely because they’re a new kind of middleman: instead of sending readers to sites, they can read, summarize and act on information inside the browser itself. And that could further cut publishers out of both clicks and the audience relationship, just as AI search is already doing.

Tools like Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s Atlas, The Browser Company’s Dia/Arc experiments, and Google’s Gemini-in-Chrome features hint at where this is going in 2026: browsing that feels more like an assistant running errands than a user clicking links. And that is exactly the kind of shift that can quietly collapse referral traffic and make publisher content the raw material rather than the destination. 

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