✳️ The Things We Don’t Quite Talk About

On how brand partnerships have narrowed what the running media talks about

Hey pals,

A delightful flu left me feeling like an unmotivated slug this week, so no news breakdowns or analysis today. Just a little thought about the dark arts of brand partnerships and how it guides where we focus our attention in trail running, and what it compresses.

Hope you had a better week than mine (or were invited on ACG’s “All Conditions Express” train ride through the Alps),

Matt

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🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

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Lately I’ve been thinking about the dark arts of sponsorships, gifting and investments that is thoroughly embedded in running media, and about what it quietly changed once it became normal. Not in a scandal sense and not aimed at any one creator (although I know we all know more than one). More as a background effect, something you notice after enough podcasts, reviews, and race-weekend coverage start to blur into patterns.

Running media and influencers have professionalised. Brands fund shows, athletes overlap with product development, outlets take on consulting work, and creators build real businesses hawking gels and AI training plans. None of that is surprising, and none of it is inherently negative. The interesting bit is how the presence of money subtly shapes the edges of the conversation.

The content itself is rarely dishonest. Shoes are still tested. Races are still covered. Interviews are still engaging and often insightful. If anything, production quality has gone up across the board. The change is more about range than truth, a quiet narrowing of what tends to get explored deeply versus what gets skimmed or skipped.

One example is comparison. You’ll often hear why a shoe is good, who it’s for, or how it fits into a brand’s ecosystem. What’s a bit harder to find is clear hierarchy when two closely connected brands are involved. Not impossible, there are creators who do this better than publications, but generally evaluation leans additive rather than subtractive. Many strengths, fewer decisive weaknesses. In a sport built on marginal gains and gear nuance, that softness stands out, even if most consumers only feel it rather than consciously note it.

Bigger structural questions also tend to appear less frequently than product-level ones. Things like why certain races receive disproportionate media attention relative to participation, why some athletes feel omnipresent regardless of results, or why prize money in trail can stagnate while marketing budgets expand. These aren’t hostile questions and they’re not even especially controversial. They’re just slower, more complex, and sometimes less compatible with the formats that dominate running media - chummy podcasts, pithy social clips. Incentives play a role, but so does medium. I don’t think it’s avoidance, it’s just friction that feels counter to the optimistic outlook of running media.

Another subtle gap is follow-up. Running media is very good at launches and announcements - fancy new shoes, shiny new brands, exciting new race series. It’s quieter when something doesn’t land (unless you’re Tracksmith). A product line disappears, a race folds, a brand pivots away from a category, and it often just fades rather than gets revisited. This isn’t unique to running; most enthusiast media is forward-looking by nature. But the effect is a thin institutional memory. Everything feels new because little gets formally closed.

Complicated issues show a similar pattern. “Innovation”, “community”, and “growth” travel well as marketing stories. But trade-offs, whether rising prices, environmental impact, athlete burnout - the difficult things to broach in a pithy manner – they’re less investigated. If they are, they’re usually framed individually rather than systemically. Again, this isn’t censorship. It’s narrative narrowing. Clean stories move easier than complicated ones.

Perhaps the most interesting layer is storytelling itself. Certain narratives repeat across seasons: the authentic founder, the athlete-designed product, the community-first launch. Many of these stories are true and worth telling. They’re also effective marketing structures, and it’s relatively rare to see much examination of why they work so well (or whether anyone cares) or what other narratives they might crowd out. Running media is good at telling stories; it’s less interested in analysing the mechanics of it’s storytelling.

None of this requires bad intent. In most cases it’s the opposite. Creators genuinely like the products they cover and the people they work with. It’s not deception so much as curation by incentive and format. Over time, audiences are exposed to a consistently partial picture. Certain questions drop below the threshold of “worth asking,” not because they’re wrong, but because they introduce friction, complexity, or simply don’t fit the channel.

It’s also fair to say that many consumers already understand the basics. People know creators have sponsors. They know brands want favourable coverage. The running audience (especially gear-focused or industry-adjacent readers) is often more media-literate than it gets credit for. We’re aware of the money involved, but we’re also aware of subtle articulation of boundaries. We sense where comparisons soften or follow-ups disappear but don’t always name it. Media literacy here isn’t about spotting #ads anymore. It’s about noticing absences, for instance which brands rarely get directly compared, which failures never quite get revisited, which topics consistently stop one layer short.

Running isn’t unique in this. Cycling, tech, food, and fashion media have all gone through similar phases. The difference is that running still likes to see itself as especially grassroots and authentic, which can make structural analysis feel cynical when it’s really just observational. The industry has matured financially faster than it has matured institutionally, and that shows up less in ethics debates and more in conversational blind spots.

So, what’s a realistic next step? Probably not public callouts or lengthy legal-style disclosures. Those tend to create more noise than clarity. A more practical move would be to normalise simple saying when you’re being incentivised. Small, repeatable bits of context that help audiences interpret coverage without turning every mention into a disclaimer.

That might look like a standing “how we work with brands” page linked in show notes, a consistent footer line in reviews, or a brief verbal note at the start of recurring sponsored segments. Nothing heavy. Just stable reference points. The aim isn’t to distance running media from commerce (that’s neither possible nor necessary), but to widen the conversational range again. When audiences have clear context, creators often gain more freedom to compare, revisit, question, and remember without it feeling like a breach of trust.

For those thinking “isn’t this already in law?” you would be correct in most instances. Any time you mention a brand that either sponsors you, gifted you anything or that you invested in, you need to disclose that according to both US, UK and EU law. But legal disclosure and conversational clarity aren’t the same thing. A brief “#ad” tag or a line in the show notes may satisfy regulation while doing little to change how content is perceived or what topics feel comfortable to explore. These laws set the floor for transparency, not the ceiling for editorial range. An industry can be compliant (although I’d argue we’re not the best at it) and still develop predictable blind spots simply because relationships, access, and formats influence what feels worth saying.

We’re never going to get every influencer and media outlet disclosing all their commercial ties, but we can notice its effect on content breadth. Running media doesn’t lose credibility because money is involved, it loses it when the presence of money quietly shrinks or loudly amplifies what gets talked about. Small signals of context can do a surprising amount to reopen that space.