About The Investigation. Every Wednesday, ADOTAT publishes one long piece built from primary sources rather than press releases: written on-record answers, contracts, filings, transcripts, and the questions the trades tend not to ask. The format is deliberately narrow.

One subject, named companies, named executives, and every claim put to the people it concerns before publication, with their answer printed as they gave it or their silence noted. Nothing here is sponsored, nobody reviews it in advance, and the reporting runs whether or not the subject is a friend of the publication.

Let's get one thing out of the way, because my inbox seems confused about it.

I did not go looking for this. I did not sit down in Phoenix with a cup of coffee and a grudge against a small company in New Rochelle that sells sports ads to car dealers. I have plenty of grudges. They're mostly reserved for holding companies.

This one walked in the door on its own, and then it kept walking in, and then it started bringing friends.

After part one ran, the tips didn't slow down. They multiplied like rabbits in a hutch with the door left open. A former employee of one of the resellers. An anonymous reader with a fake name and a fake phone number. And a message at 12:26 in the morning from an email address built so nobody could ever write back.

I don't enjoy these. Anyone who tells you investigative work is fun has never spent a Tuesday night reading a sellers.json file. These stories eat weeks. They cost sources sleep. Nobody throws you a parade for asking a broadcaster where its inventory came from.

But when a rights holder looks at a product with its logo on it and says it didn't authorize it, you don't get to shrug and go back to covering the upfronts.

So here's exactly what this is, because precision is the only thing separating journalism from a group chat.

We have not established that anyone sold inventory they didn't have, or that any campaign failed to deliver. We have documented the pitch, and we are testing the authorization and delivery behind it.

We're pulling a string and writing down what comes out of the wall.

Nothing here is illegal on its face. Let me say that louder for the lawyers already warming up their keyboards. Reselling ad inventory is legal. Bundling it is legal. Taking a pile of leftover breaks and putting a bow on them is legal. Calling an HVAC company in Macon and selling them the dream is legal, and frankly it's the most American thing in this story.

Most of advertising is somebody reselling something somebody else made, with a markup and a nicer font. That's not a scandal. That's Tuesday.

It only becomes a different story if one thing turns out to be true: that advertisers paid for placements inside specific live games, and those placements either didn't exist as sold or weren't anybody's to sell. That's the line. On one side of it, aggressive sales. On the other side, something with a much shorter name.

And even if we end up on the wrong side of that line, I'm not going to tell you everyone in this chain is a criminal. I don't believe it and I can't prove it. The local rep who sold a "team pack" because her manager handed her a one-sheet with a bulldog on it is not a mastermind. She's a person with a quota. The dealer who bought it is a person with a lot full of trucks.

If the worst version of this turns out to be true, the headline isn't "bad people." It's "nobody was checking." A product moved through big-name companies for years, and the part of the system that's supposed to ask "wait, who owns this?" was apparently out to lunch.

That's a structural failure. That's what I'm chasing.

ADOTAT's standing policy, without the corporate throat-clearing: when our reporting turns up illegal conduct, we take it to law enforcement. We are not there. We are here, holding the string, pulling gently.

For the new folks, and there are a lot of you, which is both flattering and slightly alarming.

Asellus Group is a small company in New Rochelle, New York, run by founder Carl Francese. It sells something that sounds like magic: your ad, guaranteed, inside a specific team's live game, on streaming, in your market. Not "sports fans." Not "football content." Your dealership's spot, inside the Bulldogs game, in Atlanta, on Saturday.

If that sounds premium, it's because it would be. It's the steakhouse of local advertising. The question we've been asking since August is the one any steakhouse should be able to answer without calling its lawyer: where's the beef from?

The product rarely reaches an advertiser wearing its own name. As it was described to us on background, it travels from Asellus to a partner called Addressable Media, out through supply-side platforms, and into DSPs including The Trade Desk. On the sales side, it gets white-labeled down through local sellers to the people who actually buy local TV: car dealers, HVAC companies, personal injury attorneys whose faces live on bus benches. People who are brilliant at moving trucks and have never once needed to know what a deal ID is.

In part one, we told you about a sports media company that sat through an Asellus demo about two years ago, asked where the inventory actually came from, got a hand-wave about a "special tag," and was told it was "asking too many questions." The conversation was over by email the next day.

In my experience, people with a good answer love questions. It's their favorite part of the meeting.

Recently Cox Media Group pitched a local Atlanta advertiser a package called "College Football Team Pack: Atlanta."

I've read it. It's a handsome document. It offers "inclusion in live regular season football games for the Georgia Bulldogs." It carries the Georgia "G." And it promises, in a phrase that deserves to be framed in the lobby of every ad tech company in America, "reserved inventory to ensure delivery."

Reserved inventory. It's the maître d' telling you your table is waiting. The only question is whether there's a reservation book behind the podium.

The price: $76 CPM. Seventy-six dollars for every thousand ads.

Let's make that real, with an illustration, not a figure from the proposal. If a dealer bought 500,000 impressions at that rate across a season, that's $38,000. For a single-rooftop dealer, that isn't a marketing line item. That's a salesperson. It's real money spent on a specific promise. If the promise holds, it's premium inventory at a premium price and everybody goes home happy. If it doesn't, someone paid Bulldogs prices for a hot dog.

Next to that proposal on my desk sits a 2025 Asellus and Addressable Media media kit marketing team-specific, in-game placements across college and pro sports, and a 2025 Locality memo describing placements in the Masters. I'm describing them rather than publishing them, because they came to me in confidence and carry enough fingerprints to identify the people brave enough to send them.

Asellus's own public website promises "direct integration to 'last look' inventory with the top 30 CTV networks" and markets "the most sought out live streaming sports and events on CTV at the most aggressive price."

"Last look" is a term of art. It means a final shot at inventory after other buyers have had theirs. It's a privilege a publisher grants, not something you find lying in the street. That's not an accusation. It's why the paperwork matters.

So I asked the people who manage the bulldog.

Ryan Gribble at Georgia Bulldogs Sports Marketing, UGA's multimedia rights holder, got my questions on a Tuesday afternoon and answered in about an hour. No PR filter. No "we'll circle back." Three answers, the way the First Amendment intended.

I asked whether Georgia Bulldogs Sports Marketing, Learfield or JMI had authorized Cox Media Group, Asellus Group or Addressable Media to sell placements marketed as inside Bulldogs games, or to use UGA marks.

"No."

I asked whether GBSM controls in-game advertising inside the broadcasts, or whether that sits with the networks.

"Sits entirely with the network."

And I asked whether they'd heard from local advertisers about Bulldogs streaming packages they didn't sell.

"No, but I would be interested in seeing the package you received."

That last line is the one that stays with me. The people who manage Georgia's commercial rights had never seen this Georgia-branded proposal. They asked me to show it to them. That's the landlord asking the tenant for a tour.

Now, let's be careful, because careful is how this survives contact with lawyers. There are two separate permissions in this story, and they live in different buildings.

One concerns the commercial break. Gribble's own answer tells us that sits with the network, which in 2024 meant ESPN and ABC. Georgia's "No" doesn't settle whether the network authorized anyone. The road to that answer runs through Bristol.

The other concerns the "G" on the proposal. A seller could have legitimate access to a commercial break and still have no permission to dress its sales deck in Georgia's branding. Access to the break doesn't answer the logo question. And permission to use a logo wouldn't prove access to the break.

On the logo, the rights holder I asked said no to authorizing these three companies. That's a serious matter on its own. Using a university's marks to sell a commercial product without permission is the kind of thing trademark lawyers bill handsomely to write letters about, and it's not a criminal question. It's a professional one, and for a broadcaster that lives on relationships with teams and schools, professional is the expensive kind. Cox Media Group can argue it's allowed to describe a real game by name. The logo is much harder to explain than the words. I've asked UGA for its position on the marks specifically, and whether it plans to raise the proposal with CMG, Asellus or Addressable Media. That answer is due Friday, and it will run here.

As for the network: officially, ESPN hasn't answered us. Unofficially, a senior ESPN executive, not authorized to speak, told us ESPN is investigating this and is interested in the results of our investigation.

In September I personally called the NFL, the NHL, the NBA, individual teams, Fox and NBCUniversal. None of them showed any relationship with Asellus to sell their inventory, team-specific or otherwise.

So here are the three questions, and an answer to one does not answer the others. Who authorized the branding? Who controlled the advertising opportunity? And what records show the buyer received the promised placement?