Who Authorized It? Part Four, the finale of ADOTAT's investigation into guaranteed in-game sports ads. The full case file lives at whoauthorizedit.com.

In 2024, Cox Media Group pitched an Atlanta advertiser “reserved” ads inside live Georgia Bulldogs games. The pitch had the Bulldogs' marks on it. It promised, “reserved inventory to ensure delivery.” It was the kind of offer a local business doesn't get every day: your ad, inside the game the whole city is watching.

The advertiser's marketing director read it and said no. We asked her.

Not because of the price. Not because of the creative. “We did not buy it because we knew it was not something they could guarantee based on my knowledge of how live sports streaming works,” she wrote.

She wasn't guessing. The company she uses for digital sports “also shared my distrust of the pitch we were getting and told me it was not possible to guarantee those placements.” And the other local firms she knew that got similar sports packages? “They requested time stamped delivery reports and were not able to get that.”

Read that again, because it's the whole story. Not an auditor. Not a trade body. Not a verification company with a ticker symbol. A marketing director at a local business, with a proposal in one hand and common sense in the other, asked for the one document that would have settled everything. A timestamp. Nobody could produce one.

Georgia Bulldogs Sports Marketing, the rights holder, told ADOTAT on the record that it never authorized Cox, Asellus Group or Addressable Media to sell in-game Bulldogs placements or use UGA's marks. In-game advertising, Georgia said, “sits entirely with the network.”

So Cox was selling a seat inside a game that, according to the people who own the game, was never Cox's to sell.

And the product didn't stop in Atlanta. According to people across local and national ad sales, the same “in-game guaranteed” pitch moved through station groups, white-label resellers and, eventually, agency holding companies buying for national brands, for two more years.

The customer did the due diligence. The supply chain didn't.

Here is what this investigation is about, in plain terms. For at least two years, local businesses and national agencies were sold ads “guaranteed” to run inside specific teams' live games on streaming TV, through Asellus Group and local sales groups including Cox, Locality, Premion and TEGNA. The people who own those games say they never authorized it. The sellers won't say who did. The delivery reports don't match the game clock. And some of the buyers knew it was too good to be true before they ever signed. This is not a story about bots or fake websites. It's about real ads, sold as something specific, by companies that can't show they had the right to sell it.

So this finale asks the question every buyer, seller and lawyer in this market has been asking us since September: if that's what happened, what is it under the law? Two lawyers, the accreditor and the government's own record on Cox answered. All of it is below, free.

Lee Brenner chairs Venable's Entertainment and Media Litigation Group. He answered ADOTAT's general questions on the record, in his personal capacity and not on behalf of any client. NB: He was not asked about, and did not address, any company in this investigation. The question was simple: what does the law make of a seller who markets placements inside a live game without the rights holder's authorization?

His bottom line: a company “cannot wrap itself in a team's or network's branding, sell 'guaranteed' access to inventory it does not control, collect the advertiser's money, and then defend itself by saying an ad appeared somewhere else.”

In live sports, he said, “where the ad runs is not a detail, it is the product.”

On the word at the center of every pitch in this story: “A 'guaranteed' placement inside a specific team's live game is an objective, verifiable representation. It is not sales puffery.”

On the line between a bad deal and a fraud, he needed two sentences: “Failure to keep an honestly made promise may be breach of contract. Making a promise the seller knows it cannot keep in order to obtain the buyer's money is fraud.”

On the defense everyone in this market reaches for first, that the ads ran somewhere: “Not fundamentally.” An impression delivered elsewhere “is not the same inventory” as one inside the game the advertiser bought, and a claim can be literally false “by necessary implication” even when some ad ran somewhere. It may make damages harder to calculate. It does not cure the false advertising or the breach.

On the logos: a reseller may accurately name the game where it says an ad will run. What it cannot do is use team or network names and marks “as a badge of authorization when no authorization exists.”

And on who gets to sue, the answer is everybody, for different things. The rights holder has the clearest trademark and false-association claims. The advertiser who paid has contract, fraud and state deceptive-practices claims. The FTC and state attorneys general can treat it as an unfair or deceptive practice. “Depending on the evidence of knowledge and intent,” he said, “federal or state prosecutors could also examine whether the conduct constitutes criminal fraud.”

Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School and one of the country's leading scholars of false advertising law, answered on the record. Her reading is careful, and it cuts both ways. Any fair account has to include it.

“I'd need to know more about the exact claim. If there's more than one reasonable meaning of 'inside' or 'in' the game and they deliver something that matches that reasonable meaning, then you'd need evidence that a substantial number of reasonable consumers thought it meant something else and that was material to their decisions.”

That's the defense, stated by a law professor before any defendant has to. If “in-game” can reasonably mean “shown to people watching the game,” a seller that delivered that has an argument. If the ads framed the game, she said, “that might be enough to avoid materially misleading, but it would depend.”

Federal law reaches it: “As long as the practice affects interstate commerce, and if it's broadcast or streamed then it almost certainly does, the Lanham Act applies.” But she flagged a trap for exactly the people this investigation is about: “Some state laws don't allow business plaintiffs to bring false advertising claims if their purchases are for business purposes.” Translation: the car dealer may have fewer state-law protections than the car dealer's customers.

Advertisers could sue under local consumer protection law where it allows, or for common-law fraud, “though that's very hard to win.” And competitors, the sellers of real inventory, “could sue if they showed that the falsity caused them to lose business.” That last group deserves a pause. The people with the clearest motive and the best evidence aren't the small businesses. They're the companies losing budgets to a product they say isn't real. ADOTAT has heard from more than one of them.

Put the two lawyers side by side and the fight gets very specific.

If “in-game” can reasonably mean “near the game,” a seller has an argument. If the pitch said “reserved” and “guaranteed” and carried the team's marks, that argument has a lot more work to do.

Cox's 2024 proposal promised “reserved inventory to ensure delivery,” with Georgia's marks on it. Georgia says it authorized no one.

That is the cleanest fact in this entire investigation.

It doesn't depend on a delivery report or an anonymous source. It depends on a PDF and a rights holder's answer, and both are on the record.

Readers have asked this more than any other question since Part One. The honest answer: nothing ADOTAT has published shows a crime, and we won't say otherwise until the evidence does. But the outline of the answer is knowable, so here it is.

The federal statute is wire fraud, 18 U.S.C. § 1343. Prosecutors have to prove a scheme to defraud, a material false representation, specific intent to defraud, and the use of interstate wires to carry it out. Emails, invoices and streamed ads take care of the last one. The first three are the whole case.

One recent Supreme Court decision matters here more than most of ad sales realizes. In Kousisis v. United States (2025), the Court held that using material misrepresentations to induce someone into a transaction can be wire fraud even if the victim got something of equal value back and lost nothing on net. Brenner's read: delivering substitute impressions elsewhere “does not, by itself, defeat the fraud.” He was careful to add that the no-net-loss rule is specific to criminal wire fraud, and a civil fraud claim still needs actual damages. Translation for the sales floor: “but the ads ran somewhere” is not the shield people think it is.

The ad industry has been here before, in its most extreme form. In 2021 a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Aleksandr Zhukov, the self-styled “king of fraud” behind Methbot, of wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and money laundering. He got 10 years. Methbot sold video ads that never ran on real sites and were never seen by a human being. The ads didn't exist, and that made the case easy.

This is not that. Nobody has told ADOTAT the ads never ran. The allegation, from the people who have talked to us, is narrower and harder: real ads, shown somewhere, sold as something specific they weren't. That's the distance between a botnet and a mislabeled product, and it's exactly where Tushnet's “more than one reasonable meaning” lives.

What would move this from a civil fight to a criminal one? Two kinds of evidence, and ADOTAT has seen neither. First, proof of falsity from the other end of the pipe: the platforms' and rights holders' own logs showing that impressions billed as “inside Game X in Market Y” didn't run there. Second, proof of knowledge: emails, chats or internal guidance showing that the people selling “in-game guaranteed” knew it wasn't. Intent is the element that separates an overeager sales deck from a federal case.

On that second category, the signs are piling up. Former employees at two resellers say people knew not to sell it. A buyer knew in 2024 it couldn't be guaranteed. Asellus told a buyer in writing it doesn't receive break data while billing impressions to named games. Buyers asked for timestamps and couldn't get them. A sample report shows completed views exceeding impressions 596 times. None of that is proof. All of it is the trail an investigator would follow.

ADOTAT's policy is not hedged: when an investigation turns up illegal conduct, we take what we learn to law enforcement. If the evidence crosses the line, they'll have it.

There's a civil path that doesn't require proving intent, and Cox Media Group knows it well.

In August 2026, the FTC finalized its order against Cox over “Active Listening,” a product sold to small businesses as AI that targeted local ads from conversations overheard by smart devices. The FTC said the capability didn't exist, alleging the product actually resold consumer email lists from data brokers and did not reliably target the geographic areas customers asked for. Cox paid $880,000 and accepted an order that runs 20 years and bars it from misrepresenting its advertising services, including geographic targeting.

The Bulldogs pitch came before the order. The order now governs what Cox can promise next.

A consumer protection lawyer familiar with FTC enforcement, speaking on background, said that when small businesses buy as customers, the FTC can and has treated them as consumers under Section 5 of the FTC Act, though it still has to prove deception or unfairness. The FTC's own small-business guidance covers paying for goods and services you didn't receive.

Cox, including its general counsel, has had the questions: whether it sold any in-game placements after the order became final, whether any rights holder authorized the 2024 Bulldogs package, and whether advertisers who bought it will get refunds. Cox has not answered. Its deadline runs through Thursday, Oct. 29, and anything it says will be added here.

Asellus tells buyers its proof of delivery is reporting by the hour. So ADOTAT read an Asellus NFL season by the hour.

An NFL broadcast runs more than three hours, with commercial breaks in every quarter. The fourth quarter is where in-game inventory is supposed to be worth the most: the two-minute warning, the comeback drive, the part of the game nobody changes the channel during.

By the report's own clock, almost none of the ads ran there.

There are innocent ways a curve like that can happen. Frequency caps fill early. Budgets pace front-loaded. People tune in at kickoff. None of them looks like ads sold as running inside the commercial breaks of a three-hour game. What it looks like is a campaign aimed at people starting to watch sports. That might be a perfectly good product. It just isn't the product on the pitch.

Then there's Prime. The same report bills roughly 1.09 million impressions labeled Prime to individual local markets. Thursday Night Football belongs to Amazon. Amazon has not answered whether it sells Thursday Night Football ads by local market, or whether it has any relationship with Asellus.

Asellus's president, Carl Francese, told ADOTAT in September that more than 90% of Asellus campaigns carry at least one third-party verification service, including Comscore. That sounds like a receipt. So ADOTAT went to the body that accredits the receipts.

The Media Rating Council, which accredits the industry's measurement and verification products, answered on the record. Does any accredited product verify that a streaming ad ran inside a specific live event? The MRC said it doesn't believe “that level of detail is typically part of the products we audit, including with verification vendors.”

Does any accreditation cover publisher identity or rights-holder authorization for resold CTV inventory?

“No, we do not cover that type of information.”

Mike Zaneis, CEO of TAG, the industry's anti-fraud certification body, said the same about his lane: “We stay in our lanes, meaning certifying only for fraud, brand safety, malware and transparency. Other types of traditional financial fraud, such as fraudulent misrepresentation of the good or service provided are not covered by our work.” Unauthorized inventory, he said, is “outside of our scope.”

So here is what the industry's checks are built to tell a buyer about whose game it was: nothing. Not because anyone is hiding it. Because nobody built it to ask. The fraud machinery catches bots, spoofed domains and invisible ads. It was never built to catch a real ad, shown to a real person, sold as something it wasn't.