Hello everyone, welcome to Edition 109!

Gabriella here, and today I’m really excited to be diving into IGN Entertainment’s Generations in Play report (and randomly name-dropping my current favourite TV show. It’s relevant, I promise).

The below explores generational discovery and what fan-led businesses need to consider when trying to bridge those divides.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• EA Sports FC and College Football set multiyear deal with Visa for in-game rewards and experiences

• Griffin Gaming Partners launches $100m fund for indie games with Hollywood potential

The generational divide: finding your audience vs your audience finding you

Today, discovery tends to be something between accident and kismet. Something appears in your feed, a friend shares a clip in a group chat, a creator you already follow goes deep on a title you’d dismissed. You’re not looking for it, but it finds you anyway (cue Jaws music).

That's a completely different experience from how we all discovered our favourite passions and fandoms a decade ago. I remember doing deep dives into my favourite actors’ Wikipedia pages to see what else they’d done, or desperately searching for when my favourite band would go on tour again (unfortunately, most of the bands I love are now dead). I looked on purpose before committing time or money to anything.

These two methods of engagement are labelled as different operating systems by IGN Entertainment's Generations in Play report. They’re built in different media environments, running entirely different logic about what earns attention, trust, and commitment.

For you, understanding that nuance means you can build a diverse and loyal audience by knowing how to campaign and live in those separate operating systems.

Discovery has inverted

These new operating systems have caused what the report calls “The Great Discovery Inversion.”

Gen X approaches entertainment with a destination in mind. They search with intent, prioritise name recognition, and are 38% less likely to use AI for discovery. What I found surprising was that this didn’t stem from technophobia, but because they're a generation that demands human accountability behind every recommendation.

Gen Z, by contrast, lets discovery happen to them. Social algorithms are their primary entry point. 85% of Gen Z respondents use social media for news and updates. They're 16% more likely to browse recommended videos on YouTube rather than searching for anything specific. The platform does the curation for them.

Millennials sit in the middle, and are the most interesting cohort as a result (way to go, fellow Gen Y-ers!). We’re the last generation to default to Google, but the first to fully adopt the feed. We basically triangulate, using reviews, creator deep dives, and community recommendations. We treat them as complementary layers of validation rather than competing sources. We’re 43% more likely to prioritise depth and expertise as a trust signal vs other generations.

→ A side note: We’re also the podcast generation. Millennials are 16% more likely to listen than any other cohort, treating audio as an intentional, high-attention slot built into the daily routine rather than passive background noise. If you’re really targeting us, podcasts are an underutilised channel!

As we covered in Edition 106, the same thing is happening on the media buying side: the most efficient brand growth is now happening outside traditional channels, reaching audiences that linear TV never touches. The report I’m talking about now shows why: because it isn’t just the platforms that have changed, but also the discovery mechanisms for younger audiences that have fundamentally shifted.

If your content strategy is built around intent-driven search, you're invisible to the audience running a feed-first operating system. I think the winning approach is designing for both utility content that earns high-intent search and social-native content that earns its way into the algorithm.

Who’s leading by example?

There are a few great examples of brands and IP holders that were able to authentically participate in these different operating systems.

1) Spotify Wrapped - it’s the clearest cross-operating-system campaign in mainstream marketing. 

• Gen X gets it as a utility/data product, with precise statistics about their own behaviour, delivered as information they can validate and share credibly.
   

• Millennials view it as a talking point for group chats, something to connect to when listening to broader cultural conversations taking place on podcasts, and on social media discourse about what their listening history says about them as a person. 
  

• Gen Z get it as a feed-first social event. Wrapped arrives to them on Spotify; they didn't go looking for it, and it's designed to be participated in collectively rather than consumed individually. 

A report into Spotify Wrapped’s 2024 campaign found conversations spanning all five living generations, with each engaging through a completely different lens. The genius is that the same product speaks to all three operating systems and multiple generations without compromising any of them.

2) Fallout (the show). When the Amazon Prime series launched in 2024, IGN's own data showed Gen X flooding game guide and walkthrough pages: intent-driven, utility-first, mastery-seeking. Millennials drove podcast discussion and editorial review traffic. Gen Z's engagement was almost entirely creator-led: behind-the-scenes celebrity content, Walton Goggins memes, reaction videos, etc.

The IP was the same, but the access points were separate. 

What they got right was not trying to funnel everyone into one format. The show was the anchor, but Prime Video helped each generation find it through their own discovery system.

3) The NFL's layered strategy is a great sports-specific example, and something I wrote about just recently. The NFL now runs essentially three parallel tracks: linear broadcast for Gen X (the live-event, the season structure, the statistical narrative); creator and YouTube programming for Millennials (Drive to Survive-style athlete storytelling, the podcast ecosystem around games); and TikTok/social creator partnerships for Gen Z (personality-first, behind-the-scenes, cultural moments that extend well beyond the sport). 

Digging beyond the obvious

Duh, we hear you say. Different generations do things differently. Fair challenge. What the report specifically says about Gen Z is perhaps the most intriguing.

Gen Z is the generation:

• Most likely to accept AI summaries as equivalent to human ones (+55% compared to other cohorts).

• 55% of Gen Z say expertise and authenticity are the number one drivers of trust, surpassing brand name, production value, and endorsements.

• They're also +19% more likely to prioritise platforms with engaged communities.

• And they're +13% more likely to go to the cinema on opening weekend than any other generation.

These things look contradictory, but they aren’t. AI integrations into Google and beyond mean everyone can now get an answer to almost any question instantly. That access means information is no longer the premium, and what now becomes scarce, and therefore genuinely valuable, is judgment, community membership, and shared moments.

In short, the person behind the content, behind the answer.

That human touch is key for the things that actually shape identity and belonging, which I covered in depth last week, and will be covered in the Psychology of Fandom keynote at SEG3 London next month.

The implication for brand builders goes beyond making sure you have the human touch in your content pipeline. It means that to reach audiences authentically in their operating systems, you have to show up with more than just access to content. You need to bring a perspective, a reason to gather, and the opportunity to be part of something bigger than yourself.

Meeting your audiences where they live.

In a very niche TV show I’ve been watching recently (Tastuki: Too Kind for School on Netflix), a troubled teen has all but vanished from the local ‘community centre’ he used to frequent. The community centre’s manager decides to reach out to the kid, not by going to his house, but by logging into the game he loves to play. It’s in this virtual space that he reaches the teen first, building back the rapport that was shattered.

^{Image courtesy Nippon TV}

Okay, Gabriella, why are you bringing this up? 

Basically, the report says something similar about how Gen Z views gaming compared to Gen X. The latter are completionists. They play to finish. Their top reason for returning to a game is "wanting to build on what I've already achieved."

Gen Z inhabit games. Their top driver for returning is new customisation: skins, emotes, identity markers. Their second is community content: mods, custom maps, and user-generated additions that extend the game indefinitely. They're 20% more likely to stay with a game because of UGC. For them, the game is the background for the hangout. The win, or completion, is secondary to social engagement.

Gen A builds them. Sandbox and creative games like Minecraft and Roblox are their dominant genre. According to a different survey, 50% of Gen Alpha parents say their kids play sandbox/creative games. These aren't games with win or completion phases. The drive to return is the act of creation: building the environments for the hangout and connectivity.

All generations have one thing in common: 90% of all players use some form of game help to stay engaged with friends. This shift from “Players to Residents” tells you that utility is the connective tissue underneath all of it. The tools that help people progress and belong are what keep communities alive long after the launch window closes or the game credits roll.

These behaviours extend well beyond gaming. As we explored in Edition 104, Netflix is actively building games into its subscription model to reduce churn, because time spent inside an ecosystem is a fundamentally better retention mechanic than content that gets watched once and forgotten. The same logic (using diverse ecosystems to garner holistic loyalty) applies to sports franchises, entertainment IP, and any brand trying to build long-term community rather than one-off campaigns.

And as we've written in Edition 103, the IP that survives this era is IP that is played, watched, and lived in. 

The question for IP holders: Are you creating the conditions for longer-term residency within your IP?

The question for marketers: Are you leveraging the way Gen Z inhabits gaming spaces to create lasting brand loyalty?

Closing thoughts

I keep coming back to Fallout and the NFL, and how each generation and each operating system contributed to the success and longevity of the expansion of those IPs. I think about Tatsuki going into the video game to connect with a struggling teen. I think about the ways I found the things I love, and who introduced me to them and how.

The connecting thread of all of this is understanding that ‘audience’ isn’t just a single-use term. It encompasses all of these generations and operating systems. I think understanding them, where they intersect and where they diverge, is the most important thing any brand trying to build a dedicated and intergenerational fanbase can do. 

Speed Reads 📖

Griffin Gaming Partners launches $100m fund for indie games with Hollywood potential

The fund offers “a better way of getting capital into the hands of indie studios, many of which are not equipped for or interested in traditional equity-based investment.”

TL;DR -

• By offering project-based funding instead of equity, Griffin is targeting indie studios that want capital without sacrificing ownership.

• The focus on "sticky" genres suggests a strategy built on long-tail engagement. These genres generate the deep lore and player loyalty required to sustain a transmedia franchise beyond a single game launch.

• By installing specialised "brand stewards" the fund is effectively trying to pre-validate a game’s transmedia potential before the launch.

Why you should care

Historically, a game had to be a breakout hit before Hollywood came calling; Griffin is now treating the indie game development phase as an R&D lab for cinematic and transmedia IP.

By involving brand stewards like Dylan Clark (The Batman, The Penguin, Miami Vice) and Russell Binder (Five Nights at Freddy’s, Angry Birds, The Walking Dead) at the funding stage, they are effectively solving the scouting problem by finding and pre-validating games that have transmedia potential before they even launch.

Griffin’s Peter Levin talked about this at SEG3 LA. He described it as a ‘hub-spoke’ model. Historically, gaming was the spoke, but looking forward, “it may end up inverted where gaming ends up being the hub and the other extensions the spoke.” Griffin is now putting money on this inversion.

A game’s potential is being measured by its lore-to-revenue ratio. Specifically, how well a game’s world-building can sustain sticky communities that translate across media silos. Griffin-backed lore-driven games include Menace and Gilded Destiny. High-fidelity, physics-based games like Kinstrife and Highland Keep show they’re already thinking about minimising the visual gap between gameplay and cinematic production, ensuring these indie IPs are structurally Hollywood-ready from launch.

Electronic Arts signed a multiyear deal with Visa across EA Sports FC and College Football, building branded challenges, rewards, and real-world activations directly into gameplay.

TL:DR -

• The real-world Visa Infinite lounge at Madden Bowl during Super Bowl week bridges the in-game world and the real world

• Integrating sponsorship mechanics into career mode adds a layer of subtle activation for Visa whilst driving players’ in-game progression

Why you should care

Integrations have become the go-to for many brands - and that’s continued with Visa & EA. Branded objectives, squad-building challenges, and stat boosts tied to sponsor partnerships become integral to the game, which is, of course, a fundamentally different relationship between brand and audience than a pitchside billboard or video ad.

The College Football mechanic is the one worth stealing. Letting players simulate accepting NIL deals that actually affect their in-game career mirrors how sport works in real life and makes the brand feel like part of the world rather than bolted onto it. This integration was launched in the 2024 version of the game, but this is the first time a brand has been hard-coded into the career logic of the game.

This deal shows that there is value beyond just showing up in the game. Becoming part of the game’s economic and social systems creates a layer of natural participation that brings the brand (in this case, Visa) into the players’ lives holistically and authentically.

In other news

• PwC launch 9th edition of Global Sports Survey: read more

• DP World Tour and HCLTech announce new partnership: read more

• DAZN announces acquisition of ViewLift: read more

• Tubi reveals plans for ‘culture-forward’ Formula One altcasts: read more

• Wasserman’s The Team buys golf creator agency Provisions Golf: read more

• LaLiga to discontinue its OTT platform, LaLiga+: read more

• Heineken appoints dentsu to drive next phase of brand growth: read more

• Fox Sports teams up with Cosm to deliver FIFA World Cup 2026 in shared reality: read more

• Borussia Dortmund’s new kit is debuting in Roblox’s FIFA Super Soccer before the team even wears it: read more

• NewGen debuts Multiple creator platform powered by AI: read more

• FIFA and Fanatics expand wide-ranging relationship to include collectibles: read more

• AFL, Cricket Australia and Supercars launch on Roblox via Kayo Sports Stadium: read more

• SYBO & Rovio team up for Subway Surfers x Angry Birds 2: read more

• SheerLuxe creates fake influencers, and followers hate them: read more

• New technology to boost NFL ratings for 2026 season days after draft viewership took major hit: read more

• YouTube & Netflix reportedly expected to split NFL’s new package: read more

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hi all, Gabriella here for Edition 108!

This week, we’re delving into what Luminate’s Generative AI in Music, Film and TV report says about younger audiences’ attitudes towards GenAI, and what that means for all of you integrating it in your content pipelines.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Webtoon partnering with Genies to let fans chat with their favourite characters

• Atlassian Williams F1 Team joining the Marvel Universe

What you risk when AI becomes the storyteller

Over Christmas, I put on a jazz album I hadn't heard before. It was exactly what I wanted - no lyrics, classic, secular Christmas songs. And then, about halfway through, a thought crept in that I couldn't shake: what if this is AI?

I spent the next ten minutes on my phone trying to find out. When I confirmed it was real musicians (the New York Lounge Quartett, for those wondering), I felt something I didn't expect: relief. Not satisfaction that the music was good. Relief that it was real.

That feeling is what the Luminate Intelligence report on Generative AI in Music, Film & TV in 2026 captures. What it says about the direction of fan reaction to generative AI is important for every sports, entertainment, and gaming brand incorporating this tech into their content pipelines.

The numbers

Between May and November 2025, consumer interest in AI-written film and TV dropped from net -9% to net -20%. The shift was driven by Gen Alpha and Gen Z moving fastest in the negative direction, across every film and TV production use case that Luminate measured.

These are the fans many of you are spending the most effort trying to reach - building Roblox experiences, running Discord servers for. As we covered in Edition #94 the golden age for discovery is around 8 years old. If you get someone when they're young, you're able to build a relationship that can span decades and generations. But that relationship only grows if the emotional connection is real to begin with.

The Luminate data suggests that those young audiences are becoming more opposed to AI in the content they love, and doing so decisively. The report specifically notes that the share of indifferent respondents held steady, meaning net declines came from people shifting from open to firmly against.

The takeaway: Be savvy about where you deploy GenAI. The more AI saturates feeds and platforms, the more discriminating audiences get about when they feel something genuine. A brand that capitalised on their genuine craftsmanship is Aardman, whose Behind the Craft series walks fans through exactly how each project is made: the animatics, the clay, the fingerprints literally pressed into the puppets.

The impact

Music is a great test-case industry for other brands. AI-generated recording artists are on streaming platforms already, accumulating real streams, appearing on Billboard charts, and collecting royalties. Unsurprisingly, Suno AI is the number one music app in the App Store.

But most listeners have no idea they’re not listening to human musicians. Disclosure isn't required on most music platforms, so the provenance of many of these acts remains anonymous.

Some platforms, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, are now tagging AI-generated content, which lessens the risk of breaking your audience’s trust. However, these labels don’t say where or how GenAI was used, and with AI tools getting more sophisticated, I think transparent disclosure can be the key between keeping a fan engaged and losing them.

And the data from the report backs it up - when fans discover after the fact that something was AI-generated, sentiment shifts from neutral to decisively negative. This is almost entirely because they felt deceived, and has nothing to do with the quality of the music.

That's the real threat to fan-led brands in this environment. You don’t have to disclose where AI was used in your content, but if you’re discovered to be hiding it, you degrade your audience's trust. 

This creates both a risk and an opportunity. 

• The risk: if your music partnerships, your branded content, your campaigns start to feel like they could be AI (even if they aren’t), you’re borrowing against the trust your IP has spent years building. 
  

• The opportunity: authentic provenance becomes a differentiator. Knowing something was made by real people, for real reasons, starts to carry a premium it didn't need when that was just assumed.

Context matters enormously

Audiences went from assuming everything is human-made to assuming everything has been manipulated by AI, meaning it’s on brands to prove where their human touch is and not take for granted that an audience believes them.

But that doesn’t mean all use of generative AI is perceived as negative, and the data draws that distinction clearly.

Consumer sentiment is net positive toward AI use for visual effects, sound effects, animation and dubbing - which the likes of ILM have pioneered for many years (plug: find out more from ILM’s Elizabeth Walker’s episode of The Speakeasy).

On the flip-side, it turns net negative for scripts, synthetic actors, and digital replicas of real people. The steepest drops in comfort for Gen Alpha and Gen Z (down 21 points in six months) came specifically around AI-generated performances in the style of human artists.

My interpretation is that fans aren’t rejecting the technology itself; they’re rejecting the idea that the soul of a story can be automated.

Remember: AI in the pipeline is broadly acceptable to audiences. AI as the author of the story they love is not. Draw that line clearly before you promote anything fan-facing.

Avoiding the ‘trust penalty’ 

I think the Luminate report is reiterating something important, and something we bang on about quite a lot: the emotional relationship fans have with IP is the thing that makes it valuable. If you erode that, there’s a ‘trust penalty’ of lower engagement, weaker brand evaluations and even public backlash.

For fan-led organisations, losing trust is a direct threat to the connection that not only makes your IP valuable but also drives the fan along their journey from discovery to purchase, making it part of their identity and an advocate for it.

The brands navigating this well in 2026 are separating two things:

1. AI as infrastructure (smarter distribution, personalised discovery, production efficiency), all of which fans broadly accept.

and

2. AI as a creative voice (where audiences' tolerance is shrinking fastest, especially among the youngest fans you most need to build with), i.e. Coca-Cola's AI-generated 2024 holiday ad, which still drew public criticism despite being impressive.

Closing thoughts

We’ve talked before about how to create reentry touchpoints for lapsed audiences. But if you lose a fan over authenticity, that’s much harder ground to recover.

As I talked about in the last newsletter, we all know generative AI tech is here to stay, and it’s up to brands to figure out how best to use it.

In my opinion, there’s a simple question to always ask yourself: does this tool deepen my relationship with the fan/enhance their experience, or does it just cost less? In short, it’s efficiency vs enhancement.

If you can get that distinction right from the start, you’ll be able to maintain that invaluable emotional connection to your fans without sacrificing innovation.

Speed Reads 📖

Webtoon partners with Genies to let fans chat with their favourite characters

Webtoon is integrating Genies' AI avatar technology into its platform, allowing fans to interact with characters from select titles in 3D, chat-based formats.

TL:DR -

• The opt-in model gives creators control over whether and how their characters are extended, which protects Webtoon's creator community trust

• Interactive collectibles tied to character interactions are a largely untapped monetisation layer that AI can help to unlock

Why you should care

Webtoon is explicitly positioning this as creator-first: participation is opt-in, every character experience is built to reflect the original work, and creators work directly with Genies to customise how their characters appear and behave. This is a smart move, and it lessens the risk that the authenticity that made fans care in the first place will erode.

As we’ve discussed above, trust is incredibly important, so building creator approval into the process from the start gets buy-in, and helps Webtoon to continue innovating with the creator on-side whilst they try new things to engage fans.

The collectibles piece is worth watching, too. Webtoon is effectively creating a new engagement pattern: fans interact with characters, unlock items, and access expanded lore. That's a retention and monetisation mechanic, and if it works at scale, it becomes a template for how narrative IP gets extended in the age of interactive media.

In other news

• Chiliz global fan report, US edition: read more

• YouTube inks deal making SiriusXM exclusive audio advertising rep in US: read more

• The ESPN App is set to be streaming home for all CW Sports live events starting this summer: read more

• Duolingo dials back its 'unhinged' marketing: read more

• MLB Players, Inc. names Hard Rock Bet an officially licensed sportsbook, launches player imagery integration: read more

• Bundesliga and adidas enter into strategic cooperation to jointly strengthen the further development of German professional football: read more

• Manchester City launch City Space in Xtadium, a new virtual reality experience developed with YBVR: read more

• Call of Duty: Mobile - Godzilla x Kong official trailer: read more

• InStudio Ventures launches $50 million sports investing fund anchored by NFL Team Stakes: read more

• JPMorganChase becomes official bank of Team USA and LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games: read more

• Can AI-free films become an online powerhouse? Justine Bateman thinks so: read more

• Box office behaviour: Hollywood can’t keep up with culture: read more

• Sega's participation in the MGM IP universe: read more

• ‘SpongeBob Tower Defence,’ highest-earning IP-based game on Roblox, launches 2.0 version in partnership with Paramount: read more

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Welcome to Edition 107! But before we dive into it, a quick heads up about what's happening in 50 days’ time…

SEG3 London (June 18-19). Super Early Bird passes end this Thursday at midnight. Join the likes of Warner Bros., London Marathon, Hasbro, Supercell and many more who, over the last few days, have locked in their spot for this summer.

Right, onto what you came for…

This week we’re delving into YouTube’s pushback against AI-made content, how their deepfake detection tool can actually give you a window into what fans are loving, and ways to build on that knowledge.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Inside the NFL’s social strategy for its 2026 draft
  

• Toei Games Publishing Division launches with three new games

Your fans are already making content about you. Now what?

YouTube just opened its deepfake detection tool to anyone in entertainment who's at risk of having their likeness misused. Actors, athletes, musicians; you don't even need a YouTube channel.

I think we can all agree that having a meaningful mechanism to protect against the most harmful uses, like content that damages reputation, replaces work, or puts words in a person’s or character’s mouth they'd never say, is a plus.

It’s a conversation that was sparked by the infamous Brad Pitt v. Tom Cruise video, which showed just how quickly the technology is evolving, and how life-like the outputs are becoming.

How it works and who it’s for

YouTube has spent three years building this tool. For those of you familiar with the platform, its architecture mirrors Content ID (the platform's long-standing system for identifying copyrighted footage), but instead of a clip or a song being protected, it's now a face.

It works by uploading your likeness into the tool, and YouTube's system then continuously scans the platform and flags potential matches for that person's team to review.

It ran as a pilot program with Creative Artists Agency’s (CAA) roster in late 2024, then extended to politicians and public officials, and is now available to anyone who needs it.

So, what happens after something gets flagged?

Well, requesting removal doesn't guarantee it. YouTube's community guidelines still protect parody and satire. So, a comedy deepfake can stay.

What gets pulled is content that crosses into what the platform calls ‘realistic and consequential disparagement’ or ‘content replacement’ i.e. if someone uses your likeness to make something so close to your actual work that it directly substitutes for it.

One thing notably absent for now is monetisation.

With content ID, rights holders can share in the revenue of infringing uploads rather than just remove them. This tool doesn't do that yet, though YouTube's Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe confirmed it's in their longer-term thinking.

Playing devil’s advocate 

It would be easy, and overly simplistic, to brand anything AI-generated as bad, because what it tells us about fan attention is, actually, useful. 

At the CNBC conference, Warner Bros co-CEO Pam Abdy was asked about AI-generated fan trailers for Practical Magic 2, and her response wasn't outrage.

"I know it’s not great, but it’s also exciting," Abdy said, "because that means that there's a desire for it, and that means that people want to come and play with the movie."

That's the line I keep coming back to. People want to come and play. 

During the pilot program with CAA, large creators found that most content that flagged was benign, or better yet, even positive: Fan edits, tributes, appreciation and engagement made by AI tools and living on social media. Many requested the removal of only a small fraction of what surfaced.

That tells us something important. The deepfake crisis everyone is bracing for is real, but it exists alongside a much more prevalent phenomenon: fans using new creative tools to celebrate and be part of IP they love. The question for brands isn't just: "How do we protect ourselves?" It’s also: "What do we actually do about all the people who are already here, making things, and mean us no harm?”

In a previous edition, we spoke about four ways to separate infringement from participation, by:

1. Setting clear creative guardrails for emerging platforms and tools, so people know what’s acceptable and what is not.

2. Defining licensing pathways so good-faith creators don’t have to operate in grey areas.

3. Exploring micro-licensing or retroactive monetisation models where these infringements can be turned into revenue.

4. Using technology to track and categorise usage properly - so you can find infringements, big or small, and respond proportionately rather than with blanket reactions.

Finding a way to lean into fans who are creating content around their favourite brands and IP is where a lot of opportunity exists right now.

Brands that did it right

The data we've seen from the creator economy backs this up - fan-created content and micro-influencers are revenue drivers. In the first half of 2025, YouTube sponsorships were up 54% year-on-year. Brands bet on creators as their primary reach vehicle. Discovery through social sharing drives 30-40% higher retention than traditional acquisition channels. Fans who find something through a friend already feel like they belong before they've even engaged with the original IP.

If your IP has the kind of fandom that makes people want to make content about it, that's an opportunity.

Banijay understood this when they launched their Creators Lab with YouTube, offering up to €50,000 for creators to reimagine classic TV formats for digital audiences (which we covered in Edition 66). Rather than watching their IP get remixed without credit, they built the tools for it to happen officially. The creators got legitimacy. Banijay got reach, relevance, and a new generation of storytellers invested in their library.

As we wrote about in Edition 95, Puma did something similar with Marseille, building an AI tool that lets fans design the club's next kit and vote on the result. One fan, eventually, will be able to say: "I designed that." The brand gets an activating force multiplier, and the fan gets the ultimate story.

Both of these examples hit the steps we’ve outlined for engaging fans. They gave creators guidelines and tools, set up clear licensing rules, and delineated between what’s acceptable output and what isn’t.

Brands utilising this kind of innovation show an understanding that fandom is participatory. As we covered in Edition 80: 42% of fans are creating content surrounding their fandoms (and that number rises to 50% for Gen Z). In Edition 82, we went into how Lionsgate are tapping into that to promote their films.

Clearly, the path is there for studios and IP holders to engage their proactive fandom and reap the rewards of it. YouTube has given you a new tool to figure out how to engage these communities within your audience through micro-influencer fans.

Closing thoughts

With YouTube’s new tool, power is back in the hands of the IP and rights holders to decide if the content that’s being flagged does more harm than good. If you want a blanket take-down, go for it. But if you want to see what your fans are loving, engaging with, and sharing across YouTube and then build on it, you can.

Control is important, and protecting someone’s likeness is necessary. I also think that using this new tool to remove everything that infringes would be a guaranteed way to alienate your most engaged audience.

Instead, using YouTube’s deepfake detection tool as a way to gather data about who's creating, what they're making, and what's resonating, gives you something far more valuable: authentic insight. And it’s that insight that can help drive your strategy moving forward.

Speed Reads 📖

Inside the NFL's real-time content command centre for the 2026 Draft

A team of 10 NFL social staff produced close to 1,000 posts a day during this year's Draft, turning a sporting moment into a social one.

TL:DR -

• Draft week on the NFL's own channels drives over 500 million views, doubled in five years. This is proof that investing in real-time content infrastructure at scale pays off

• 44% of the TikTok audience reached during the Draft was 18-24, and 30% was female - significantly younger and more female than the NFL's regular season audience, showing what non-game tentpole moments can do for audience development

• The NFL is using the Draft as a year-round content pipeline - player relationships built at the Combine and Draft feed directly into campaign planning for the season ahead

Why you should care

The Draft is proving itself to be a content event - and a goldmine at that. It’s built on anticipation, reaction, and an awful lot of opinions, and the NFL generates 500 million views from it.

This shows what happens when you start treating non-game moments as integral and build proper content infrastructure around them. For the NFL, it was a thousand posts a day. Thirty-three pieces of content per hour. 

During last year's Draft on TikTok, 44% of the audience reached was 18-24, and 30% was female. Both are significantly higher than the NFL's regular-season numbers.

If your core audience skews older and more male, a properly crafted tentpole moment can reach people your usual content never touches. The Draft is a fan moment for people who already care and an acquisition tool for people who don't yet.

What I find most interesting about the NFL's approach is what happens after the cameras go off. Relationships built with players feed into Draft content. Draft content feeds into season-long campaign planning. By the time September arrives, the social team already knows which rookies have the biggest fan interest, what they're like as people, and how they might fit into future activations.

In other news

• Anthropic’s new AI model sets off global alarms: read more

• Canva’s Peppa Pig collaboration: read more

• Venatus Partners with Roblox as Official Reseller for Rewarded Video Across the UK, France and Germany: read more

• DICK'S Sporting Goods’ enhanced athlete experience play with Adobe: read more

• Meta to cut 10% of workforce in AI push: read more

• Lewis Hamilton to open international chain of trading card shops: read more

• WBC rights set to be bundled with MLB, league probed for streaming costs: read more

• Japan to protect celebrity voices against AI use: read more

• Crunchyroll's global celebration of anime across retail, gaming, events and more: read more

• Porsche x Pixar: the most special toys only get better with age: read more

• Amazon and Anthropic expand strategic collaboration: read more

• Quickture raises $4.5 million to help editors turn hours of footage into rough cuts faster: read more

• Studio71 sold to Fixated, giving the company the network of 1,000-plus digital creators: read more

• The Sims 4 marketplace launches on PlayStation, Xbox, making UGC available for the first time on consoles: read more

• Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser unveils cast of his sprawling ‘Absurdaverse’ video game-tv series franchise: read more

• Anime is no longer “watch-only.” It’s becoming a full-stack experience: read more

• Sanrio launches gaming brand, tapping fast-growing global market: read more

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hi folks, Gabriella back for Edition 106!

Before we dive in, a lot of the themes we cover in this edition will be explored live at SEG3 London this June 18-19, with leaders from BBC Studios, Universal Music Group, Mastercard, Unity and more joining.

Now, back to what you came for.

This week, we’re digging into Dentsu’s Brand Reset report, and what kind of attention can actually help you to drive sales vs grow your brand.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Formula E’s partnership with 3DClouds for Formula Legends game
  

• Gary Neville's The Overlap buys Mark Goldbridge's YouTube channels

Maximising Attention (Without Wasting Budget)

Dentsu has released its landmark The Brand Reset report, surveying 40,000 respondents across 10 platforms, testing 60 ads per platform, and measuring what actually happens to a brand's long-term sales trajectory when someone watches, or skips, an ad.

We talk a lot in this newsletter about the battle for attention. About how most content gets ignored, and how building connection in a world where we’re programmed to scroll, swipe and skip is the defining challenge of modern marketing.

What jumped out at me when I read through this (twice, it’s dense!) was that it challenges the assumption that all attention is created equal…it’s not.

What matters now isn’t just how much attention you get - but what kind, where it happens, and how efficiently you can buy (or attract) it.

On that note, I’ve plucked out four key takeaways which can be helpful as you start to define the type of attention you need or want:

Short-form isn’t just for discovery - but also builds brand

Despite the long-standing assumption that linear TV is the best channel for driving long-term growth, the data doesn’t necessarily support that anymore.

Yes, linear continues to drive stronger lift per exposure (4.5% vs ~2% for digital video) - but when you factor in cost, short-form starts to outperform on efficiency, with it being cheaper per unit of brand growth.

That efficiency means it’s become a scalable way to build brand equity, especially when it reaches audiences that more traditional channels miss.

In the context of entertainment, an analysis of 38 theatrical campaigns found audiences exposed to TikTok movie promotions were 172% more likely to buy tickets, with 60% of those purchases coming from people linear TV never reached.

And I think that’s an eye-opening stat that shows the most valuable discovery is now happening outside your vertical. Leaning into the blurred lines between industries and passion points is where growth opportunities exist.

So remember: Short-form isn’t just for maintaining relevance, but if positioned well, it can be used to build your brand and generate new revenue.

CTV is having a moment

Connected TV is closing the gap to linear TV (3.2% vs 4.4% long-term lift) - showing a clear change in behaviour.

As audiences increasingly consume long-form content through streaming platforms, and major sporting competitions, awards shows and more move to CTV in major markets, attention is shifting to CTV.

For sports and entertainment brands negotiating rights, planning media buys or building direct-to-fan streaming products, this is data worth having up your sleeve. Being present on streaming environments doesn't mean diluting brand impact - instead, it presents brands with another avenue for engagement.

Don’t fear the skip button

We’ve all been there - waiting impatiently for the little ‘skip’ button to appear on our Yoga With Adriene YouTube video (just me?) so we can get to downward dog.

But sometimes there’s an ad that holds your attention (Three’s singing donkeys come to mind) and you don’t click that button.

And it turns out that those skippable ads that succeed in holding attention can have a huge brand-building effect if that attention can be sustained.

The takeaway, while skippable formats have a lower impact when viewed for just one to two seconds, their impact surpasses non-skippable ones when attention is sustained.

The important thing to remember is that this is voluntary attention, so it’ll require a different standard of creative to earn the attention. But as Jason Steele from the IOC, who spoke at SEG3 London in 2024, said:

“Do not run away from skippable formats. Build creative [and] people actually choose to keep watching (land the message early with brand cues). In sport, the right story, talent, emotion or moment can earn that attention”.

This also lines up with Netflix’s Still Watching report (which we covered in Edition #83), where over 70% of viewers say they actually pay attention to ads when they fit the story.

It means ads that earn their place in the feed, that feel native, that land emotionally, that connect to culture, will get watched.

And for brands that have fans (most of you reading!), you’re at an advantage. For example, the sports fan will watch a 90-second brand story because it features their favourite athlete, references their team's rivalry, or taps into something current - and all of this gives you more valuable attention.

More isn’t always better

There is a ceiling I’m afraid. After ~20 seconds, attention delivers little additional impact. 

In short: the goal isn’t necessarily to maximise time spent - but to maximise the impact within a limited window.

So, the real question becomes what are you doing with those first 20 seconds? How good can your hook be? What story can you tell? What is your objective with the content? All of this helps to create memorable content that delivers against your objectives.

Where this leaves you

Successful campaigns have always been about earning attention in the environments where fans are choosing how to spend their time. That isn’t going to change.

What has changed is how that attention is garnered - it’s fragmented, it’s harder to keep for long periods of time, and it’s increasingly happening outside of your usual lanes.

That means battling changing algorithms, noisy platforms and consumer behaviour that is to scroll, swipe, and skip.

So in order to drive growth, it’s no longer just about reach, volume or ‘doing more’. It’s more about being deliberate about where you show up, the formats you use, and the stories you tell.

That way, you’ll be on the right track to capture more valuable attention.

Speed Reads 📖

Formula E enters Simcade Racer Formula Legends

Formula E has partnered with developer 3DClouds to bring a fully-licensed expansion to Formula Legends covering the full history of the championship from GEN1 to GEN3 EVO.

TL:DR -

• Licensing IP (teams, drivers, tracks, cars etc) into an established game is a lower-risk, faster route to new audiences

• Formula E specific mechanics integrated into the game is fan education disguised as entertainment

Why you should care

As of 2025, Formula E estimates they have 422 million fans globally. Whilst that’s an incredible number, I think it’s perhaps fair to say it doesn't yet have the kind of big, cultural footprint that pulls in younger, more casual fans.

Gaming is one of the clearest pathways to engaging with younger audiences who spend more time in games than watching live sport, according to the Altman Solon report we dug into in Edition 103. This is key for anyone trying to reach new audiences, and automotive brands are already seeing the impact of this kind of integration.

By partnering rather than building, Formula E is tapping an existing audience whose entertainment interests align with Formula E - and introduces the championships rules, teams, cars, tracks etc to an audience that might never have engaged with it otherwise.

In other news

• How Chase empowered innovative brands to sell at a massive pop culture festival: read more.

• SBI sets up entertainment fund with Cool Japan Fund: read more

• Voldex partners with the LEGO Group to bring a limited-time experience to Brookhaven: read more

• Medal x Jestr: two short-form titans are teaming up: read more

• PUMA launches PUMA Group x The Pokémon Company International collaboration: read more

• SBI Chiliz and Tokyo Verdy sign Memorandum of Understanding to mutually explore tokenisation of the club: read more

• Dentsu unveils the next evolution of Dentsu.Connect: read more

• Sony Ventures Corporation Establishes fourth innovation fund: read more

• TPG to acquire leading college sports media Sales and Technology Provider Learfield: read more

• Jomboy Media and Fubo Launch 24/7 Creator-Led Channel: read more

• Dow Jones and WSJ launch new sports vertical with live event: read more

• ‘Mario’ and the new fandom flywheel upending Hollywood: read more

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Episode 12 of The Speakeasy is now LIVE - with Nic Hill, Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Sawhorse Productions in the seat.

Drawing on Sawhorse's work with the likes of NBCUniversal, Walmart, Netflix, Warner Bros. and more, we break down what it takes to build brand experiences inside platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, Rec Room and beyond.

We also get into the most common hurdles that brands fall down at, and the journey towards gaming becoming an integral part of a brands marketing mix.

Also covered during the episode ⤵️

• How to decide between building your own experience vs integrating into an existing world
  

• The development process, and balancing brand guidelines with audience expectations to make sure you deliver fun gameplay
  

• The design decisions behind the How to Train Your Dragon experience - and how studios are using platforms like Roblox and Fortnite to drive audiences to the movies

And plenty more.

—

📹 Watch now on YouTube

🟢 Watch now on Spotify

🎧 Or listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Thanks for watching and/or listening along.

Make sure to follow The Speakeasy wherever you watch/listen - and leave a review if you enjoy the show!

Have feedback or guest suggestions?

Drop us a message via the button below. We’d love to hear from you!

Hey everyone - Joe here - welcome to Edition 105!

Before we dive in, a heads up that we have some VERY exciting SEG3 London news dropping tomorrow. Drop us a follow on Linkedin to hear first if you aren’t already!

Right, onto what you came for - with this week’s spotlight diving into The Entertain or Die report, and what the data says about why entertaining brands are pulling ahead.

Plus, a Pokémon takeover of the Speed Reads with:

• Scopely & Major League Baseball’s plans for Pokémon GO in the 2026 season
  

• The Pokémon Company’s launch of ‘Night Out’ series with EDM artists Marshmello & Alison Wonderland

Let’s get into it ⤵️

Boring Brands Don’t Grow

Small World and Tracksuit have released v3.0 of the Entertain or Die report, analysing 16,200 consumers and ranking the top 100 brands on entertainment value.

What’s worse than no content?

Boring content.

And yet, it’s the unfortunate by-product of how most marketing is now set-up as brands and marketers try to maintain visibility and capture attention in an over-saturated feed.

But by focusing on sales and short-term performance vs creativity and brand, marketers are forgetting what actually helps to make their brands memorable - the way they make audiences feel, the communities that association with their brand unlocks, the escape from day-to-day life it provides, and the entertainment it delivers.

And its the latter that is the subject of the Entertain or Die Report v3, which caught my eye this week by introducing ‘The Entertainment Funnel’.

Now, funnels are nothing new - if anything, they’re losing out to the flywheel - but they are a useful way to visualise the journey a fan goes on, and where value actually accrues - which is in the actions taken further down the funnel.

The problem is, if you don’t hook an audience to begin with, you can never get to the most valuable stages of the process.

And when 80% of audiences on TikTok, 65% on Instagram & 55% on Facebook are visiting the platforms to seek out entertainment, its easy to understand why those first few steps matter so much.
 
Yet much of what brands are putting out into the ether is built to inform or sell - not to entertain and capture attention - which is why 50% of the report’s respondents said they would rather watch cows eat grass than your ads (seriously).

So, what does ‘entertaining’ actually look like in practice?

When people talked about brands they found entertaining, their responses tended to fit into one of four themes, these being:

• Connection - a brand that makes them feel something or bring them closer to others
  

• Distinctiveness - a brand that stands out and grabs attention
  

• Creativity - a brand that feels fresh, imaginative and worth spending time with
  

• Relatability - a brand that feels human and easy to connect with

In other words, these are the traits that decide whether someone connects with your brand, or whether you’re getting instantly swiped past.

And whilst everyone wants to reach as many eyeballs as possible, it is impossible to create content (nay, a brand) that appeals to everyone from the get-go.

Which is why the most successful brands today are being built from subcultures outward rather than from the masses inwards - as it gives them immediate relevance with a specific audience that they can then expand out from over time.

Think Gymshark (Fitness Niche → Lifestyle Brand), or Stanley 1913 (Outdoor Equipment Niche → Everyday Essential).

All of these created content and experiences to suit their specific niche and audience - and were then able to start to getting insights into:

• What their fans were actually spending time with

• Who they follow

• What communities they’re part of

• What they care about beyond your category

Which opens up more options to expand authentically into other parts of culture and unlock new audiences.

Because once you have that 360° view on your fan, and your content is genuinely built to entertain, you can begin to serve their needs in more targeted ways - and in doing so, you’re incentivising behaviours, like sharing, that enable you to get in front of broader audiences - effectively reverse engineering the reach that everyone craves.

But there an omission from the entertainment funnel in my opinion - creation and remixing.

As we know, the Carat & Fandom report found 87% of fans engage in activities around their fandoms, with 42% creating content (50% for Gen Z).

With UGC tools and platforms giving fans the opportunity to engage, interact and now build on their favourite IP and brands, its clear that size of audience won’t be the only deciding factor for cultural relevance anymore - instead, it will be the intensity of the fanbase, and how compelled they feel to share that fandom with others.

But all of this only starts if you can pass the first hurdle - creating something entertaining enough in the first place.

Speed Reads 📖

Pokémon GO returns to Major League Baseball parks for 2026 season

Pokémon GO is expanding its partnership with Major League Baseball for the 2026 season, bringing in-game features like raids, timed research and team-branded PokéStops and Gyms to ballparks across the league.

TL:DR -

• Location-based mechanics (raids, research, PokéStops) are being used to drive movement and engagement around MLB ballparks

• Time-bound rewards and progression loops keep fans interacting throughout the game and seasons

• Exclusive digital + physical items incentivise attendance

Why you should care

This is a continuation of a partnership that launched in 2025 (check out edition 47 for a deeper dive) - with AR overlaying the ballpark to get fans engaging and moving through a series of games that are:

• location-based (you have to be there to participate)

• time-bound (you have to act now or you’ll miss out)

• progress-driven (you have something to complete during the game or season)

Whilst these mechanics might be standard in games, they’re still relatively new to live sport - and this is still one of the only examples doing it consistently over multiple seasons.

And if this Reddit thread on the announcement is anything to go by, MLB & Scopely have successfully tapped into an engaged community at the intersection of sports and games, with clear demand from the audience for it to expand to more ballparks across the country.

It’s a playbook worth watching if you’re a sports IP looking to attract new audiences to your stadium on a regular basis.

In other news

• Arsenal & Meta launch partnership for Whatsapp & Facebook: read here.

• Roblox launches age-based accounts: read here.

• adidas builds Chaos vs Control campaign into FIFA Super Soccer: read here.

• Kings League launches customisable brand events into Clash of Captains game: read here.

• Roblox game, 99 nights in the forest, to get film adaptation with 20th Century Studios: read here.

• Bryson DeChambeau and other golf creators launch YouTube network, Source Golf: read here.

• MLB launches Clubhouse for dedicated kids content: read here.

• SEGA continues expansion into sports, partnering Sonic with Tokyo Yomiuri Giants: read here.

• FOX partners with Kalshi for prediction market integration into news: read here.

• PwC & San Francisco 49’ers launch 49’ers app: read here.

• Fanatics signs advertising deal with AT&T: read here.

• Como 1907 & EA Sports FC announce partnership: read here.

• HUGO BOSS becomes Official Lifestyle Outfitter of Australian Open: read here.

• P&G announces long-term partnership with WNBA: read here.

• UKIE released UK video games market report: read here.

• Netflix launches Jackbox Party Essentials: read here.

• Hasbro’s Daddy Pig to run London Marathon: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hey everyone - Joe here - welcome to Edition 104!

For this week's spotlight: Netflix’s launch of Playground - and the impact it could have on building fandom with youth audiences and reducing subscription churn.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of 160/90 to accelerate their push into sports
  

• OneTeam Partners & EnTrust Global launch EnOne Ventures to focus on funding businesses where athletes can play a central role in product development, customer acquisition and value creation

Right, let’s get into it ⤵️

Netflix launches PlayGround

Netflix announces Playground - a new space for kids built around games and interactive experiences, bundled into the subscription.

The playground has always been the home for kids to play games - and thats continuing on Netflix.

Netflix Playground will host games built around Peppa Pig, Sesame Street, Dr. Seuss and more - with these games bundled into all subscriptions, with no in-game ads, no in-app purchases and no extra fees.

Against a backdrop where safety and advertising in games is a hot topic, it’s a different approach that should give parents confidence in the experience their child is having whilst playing on Netflix.

But looking beyond that, I see this as another smart addition to Netflix’s flywheel that now spans games, experiences, content, live events and more - all designed to create a deeper connection with their IP, and make the subscription harder to drop.

So to understand why the addition of Playground and games is so powerful, let’s start with the problem they’re trying to solve.

Churn. It’s the word that makes any subscription business shiver.

And it’s something that even a content behemoth like Netflix is not immune to, with Antenna estimating churn (in the US) has increased to ~2.5%, up from 1.8%.

Whilst that’s just under a 1% increase, when you’re the size of Netflix, that equates to millions in lost revenue.

So, in response to this, Netflix has spent the last few years pulling a number of levers to keep people subscribed, including:

1. Launching ad supported tiers in Nov 2022 - lowering the barrier to entry for subscribers, and integrating advertisers.
   

2. Removing password-sharing in May 2023 - which almost doubled paying subscribers.
   

3. Built a strategy around live sports and entertainment events in 2024 - leading to spikes in acquisition.
   

4. Price increases in Jan 2025 - which lifted ARPU and as per Antenna’s data, actually reduced churn. Win win.

And whilst these have all worked to varying levels, many are one-off unlocks or already plateauing.

Which means we’re back to the same question. What actually keeps people coming back?

Back to that flywheel

Whilst content is the core offering, its better thought of as a foundation that everything else is built on. Netflix has been building a much broader ecosystem around their IPs that now includes:

• Music - with KPop Demon Hunters topping the Billboard charts (more in edition 67).
  

• Live events - like Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson, and the NFL Christmas games (more in edition 41).
  

• Physical experiences - through Netflix House (more in edition 40).
  

• UGC gaming - the presence of their popular IPs in Fortnite and Roblox (more in edition 37).
  

• Social distribution - through Moments, enabling fans to clip and share - improving discovery (more in edition 36).
  

• And now on-platform games - with partnerships spanning FIFA and Delphi Interactive, to TV-based party games with LEGO, Tetris and Pictionary (more in edition 81), and now Playground.

Collectively, these are extending the life of Netflix IP beyond a single viewing session, giving people more reasons to come back, more often.

Because the more time audiences spend across an IP and its surrounding communities, the higher the switching cost becomes.

The impact of fandom

In Edition 83 we covered Netflix's Still Watching report, which surveyed 9,000 Gen Z and Millennial viewers, and found that 72% of Gen Z say being a fan is core to their identity, with 87% actively sharing what they're watching with friends.

So whilst content remains the hook, we’re seeing that watching is just the starting point. By providing opportunities for subscribers to engage with IP on a deeper level and share in their experiences with friends, the IP can become core to how they see themselves.

Why games build fandom in a way TV and streaming can't

Games fills the gap between content launches - offering an always-on alternative as a pose to spikes around releases.

But more importantly, it’s the interactivity and immersion that games offers that makes it so interesting for Netflix as they expand beyond content - with a Livewire report finding 83% of parents reporting no second screen distractions during gaming.

And this is in part why we saw Netflix push into living room party games, targeting the 5 to 10pm family time slot that TV used to dominate - with the same Livewire data finding 74% of families now game together regularly, and co-playing has cut traditional TV time by 40%.

And given the importance of that time slot in maintaining relevance with families, it’s easy to see why gaming matters so much for Netflix.

So in Playground, they have a way to build deep fandom early, and early really matters - with SuperAwesome’s report on Gen Z and Gen A fandom finding the golden age for fandom discovery is around 8 years old, precisely the age group that Playground is targeting up to.

Making the subscription sticky

If a child is playing Playground daily, at home and on the move, the household subscription becomes that much harder to cancel - meaning the parent who might have churned after finishing a show now has a kid asking to play their game on a Tuesday evening, or on a long car journey.

Don’t underestimate the power of the ‘nag factor’…

But there’s more of a long-tail around it too. Whilst kids might take a break from Netflix and their IPs as they age-up, Netflix is banking that they can reactivate that connection later in life.

Essentially betting that if you entertain the kid now, you keep the family. And then when that kid grows up, they’ll return.

So what’s there to steal from this?

In some way, shape or form, every brand across the spectrum of entertainment faces the same retention challenge Netflix does.

What I think Netflix is doing well is understanding that whilst live events may drive spikes, and price increases can lift revenue, neither builds the level of affinity that keeps someone engaged over the long-term, or brings them back after they've churned.

But fandom, and the community you find within those fandoms, does.

So my takeaway is to prioritise engagement and active participation with your IPs as early as possible, across as many touchpoints as you can.

Because as Karim Farghaly of Bandai Namco said in our latest episode of The Speakeasy:

“Connecting with the fan is the number one priority - and monetisation comes later”.

Speed Reads 📖

Publicis acquires 160over90 to create data-driven sport & culture agency

Publicis Groupe has acquired sports marketing agency 160over90 - folding it into a new Publicis Sports unit as it looks to consolidate capabilities across sponsorship, media, creators and data.

TL:DR -

• Many of the holdco’s are focused on making sports marketing more measurable and performance-driven

• If sports can create inventory for shorter-term, more flexible investment from advertisers, it could open the door to a much broader pool of advertisers

Why you should care

Sports has long been a haven for brand marketers, but could we be about to see performance marketing make more of an appearance?

The way sports has traditionally been packaged, through long-term sponsorship deals, has meant it has only really been accessible to those brands willing to commit significant budget upfront.

Whilst that has served sports organisations well, it has meant that performance has been underserved within the industry - held back by a lack of standardisation, scalable inventory and clear measurement.

However, if those gaps can be addressed, there is meaningful opportunity to be had - which helps to explain why the holding companies like Publicis are now starting to prioritise sports more aggressively.

And if you’ve been reading along for a little while, you’ll know this is just their latest step into sports. As we covered in Edition 88, they have been experimenting alongside Genius Sports to deliver moment-triggered ads based on live game context and fan emotion - attempting to move the conversation away from static placements towards inventory that can react to what is actually happening and how fans are feeling to plug in advertisers.

But this is only possible with better data, new forms of inventory, and a willingness from sports organisations and media to work with partners in creative ways that are beyond the traditional sponsorship model.

If that happens, I don’t see this as something that cannibalises the brand value that sport already delivers, but instead opens the door to performance-driven budgets and a different type of buyer that has historically sat outside of sports.

So if sports is willing to be more creative with its inventory and packaging, there is a real opportunity for not just more spend - but more diverse spend which flows through more flexible models.

In other news

• LEGO launches World Cup edition with Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe & Vini Jr: read here.

• Walt Disney Records launches country music EP with Mickey & Friends: read here.

• Iris Advisors & PwC release Emerging Sports market and business model review: read here.

• Spotify launches ‘Sound On Era’ report: listen here.

• Banijay Live Studio announces Black Mirror Experience: read here.

• King takes over LA Clippers Intuit Dome for Candy Crush activation: read here.

• Coca-Cola partners with Xbox to release special edition Fanta collections for Call of Duty, Halo and more: read here.

• Blizzard Entertainment & Nexon agree publishing agreement for Overwatch in Korea: read here.

• Nestle breaks down their marketing strategy for their Formula 1 partnership: read here.

• Red Bull Faster returns to Ubisoft’s Trackmania: see here.

• Fanatics takes exclusive NFL trading card license: read here.

• Skybound Entertainment & Voodoo Ranger release Invincible vs IPA pack: read here.

• Disney Advertising takes over NFL Network, NFL Redzone & NFL Fantasy: read here.

• Essence launches Spring Island: Blooming Gardens in Kingdom of Essentia Roblox experience: read here.

• Sports Interactive partners with Boca Juniors for Football Manager 26: read here.

• Roblox launches avatar makeup: read here.

• Unity partners with Livewire for in-game advertising in Australia & NZ: read here.

• Lenovo announces partnership with David Beckham: read here.

• Oracle Red Bull Racing release 2026 fan charter: read here.

• The NHL opens Innovation Lab in New Jersey’s Prudential Centre: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

In Episode 11 of The Speakeasy, we sit down with Karim Farghaly, SVP of Business Innovation & Licensing at Bandai Namco Entertainment America, to explore what it really takes to manage, grow, and future-proof some of the most iconic IP in gaming and entertainment.

Covered during the episode ⤵️

• The framework Bandai Namco has put in place to decide whether to build, buy or partner to drive growth - and where the best deal flow is actually coming from
  

• What it takes to keep a 45-year-old IP like PAC-MAN culturally relevant without losing what makes it iconic
  

• How UGC and emerging platforms are changing their franchise strategy - from creation through to long-term management
  

• What’s actually giving companies a competitive edge in gaming today

And much more on what it takes to build, sustain and expand a franchise over generations.

—

Watch or listen now ⤵️

📹 Watch now on YouTube

🟢 Watch now on Spotify

🎧 Or listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Thanks for watching and/or listening along.

Make sure to follow The Speakeasy wherever you watch/listen - and leave a review if you enjoy the show!

Have feedback or guest suggestions?

Drop us a message via the button below. We’d love to hear from you!

Hey folks. Welcome to Edition 103!

For this week's spotlight: How legacy IP holders can reinvigorate archival content and unlock new commercial opportunities by extending IP into lifestyle.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• The SEC’s latest definition of fan tokens as collectibles

• Altman Solon’s report on sports IP monetisation

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

Turning gaming IP into lifestyle brands

The most valuable franchises are played - and lived.

TL:DR -

For most of the industry’s history, games have competed on content: new mechanics, maps, and features layered onto a core loop.

But the most enduring game IPs win for a different reason, they give players someone to become. That shift matters because it changes what we’re actually building. The center of gravity is no longer just systems or content, but the meaning those systems create. 

This happens across three layers:

• Identity: Who you get to be in the IP
  

• Ritual: How the IP shows up in your daily life
  

• Worldview: How the IP shapes how you see the world

A gaming IP becomes a lifestyle brand when it evolves from something you play to something you live inside. And when that happens, its value compounds across every dimension: audience, longevity, monetization, and cultural relevance.

From Play to Life

I felt this shift recently in a way that no report could fully capture. I grew up watching the Pokémon animated series after school, then exploring that world through different mediums as a kid. Years later, I found myself playing Scarlet & Violet with my nieces and nephews, then building a LEGO Gyrados together. 

I enjoyed the same IP, in different formats across generations with the same emotional continuity. That’s the difference between interacting with a product and having it being woven into the fabric of your life.

Identity: Becoming Someone Else (or More Yourself)

Every great game answers a simple question: “Who am I in this world?”.

• Super Mario gives you a timeless identity, the optimistic hero moving forward with clarity and purpose.
  

• Cyberpunk 2077 approaches identity from the opposite direction. It’s fluid, expressive, and constructed. You define yourself through style, augmentation, and ideology, shaping not just how you play, but who you are within the system.

In competitive ecosystems, identity becomes social. It’s how you’re recognized, how you differentiate, and how you belong. Players don’t attach to games because of what they do, they attach because of who they get to be.

Ritual: Turning Play into Practice

Identity becomes durable through repetition.

• Pokémon is one of the clearest examples of this. The IP has catching, collecting, and trading loops that extend into everyday life through games, cards, toys, and animation.
  

• Fallout operates differently. The ritual in the game of wandering, scavenging, and surviving is slower and more atmospheric. The loop becomes a mindset, one that players carry beyond the screen.

In modern ecosystems, ritual becomes social. Weekly gatherings, events, and shared play that resemble ceremonies rather than just engaging with content.

Worldview: Seeing the World Differently

The deepest layer is also the most enduring. Great IPs don’t just give players actions, but a lens to view the world.

• The Legend of Zelda is built on the belief that the world rewards curiosity, and that exploration is its own form of meaning.
  

• Animal Crossing promotes a philosophy of slow care and intentional living.
  

• Cyberpunk 2077 asks what it means to remain human in a commodified world.

Over time, players don’t just visit these worlds, but internalize their values.

What Comes Next

Games that become lifestyle IPs are built differently. They’re designed as a system of meaning, where every touchpoint reinforces the same core ideas: identity, ritual, and worldview. Visual language, physical products, events, and community behaviors all work in concert.

The next generation of breakout game IP won’t be defined by scale alone, but by how deeply they integrate into people’s lives. Because the most valuable game IP in the next decade won’t just be played, they will be lived.

[by Derick Tsai - Creative Director, Executive, Producer | Games, Entertainment, Brands]

The Speed Read 📖

SEC & CFTC publish landmark joint guidance on fan tokens

US regulators have issued a shared framework categorising crypto assets into five types - giving brands, platforms and crypto businesses a workable framework to follow.

TL:DR -

• The five types are now: Commodities, Collectibles (fan tokens/NFTs), Tools (tickets, memberships), Stablecoins & Securities.

• Whilst this is still just guidance, not law - it does suggest tokens tied to IP, access or culture will not be securities (as long as they don’t offer financial upside).

Why you should care

Crypto regulation in the US has been a bit of a minefield over the past few years, with the SEC’s categorisation of digital assets changing regularly.

And whilst this new ruling isn’t law, it does offer guidance that tokens tied to IP, access or culture are not securities - provided they don't carry economic rights like profit-sharing or yield generation.

This means brands building products around access, identity and experiences - not speculation - should be able to operate more freely, which should be a positive for fans.

In other news

• Pacers Sports & Entertainment launch Fieldhouse Media Network; an AI-powered media platform: read here.

• Authentic Brands Group & Ubisoft announce multi-season partnership for Riders Republic: read here.

• Sanrio to launch ‘personalised’ digital experiences alongside AI avatar company Genies: read here.

• NFL partners with TMRW Sports to launch new professional flag football league: read here.

• KSI, DAZN and Dagenham & Redbridge livestream game on YouTube: read here.

• Netflix & McDonalds partner for KPop Demon Hunters collab: read here.

• Disney partners with Comixit! for Mickey Mouse, Stitch & Moana webtoons: read here.

• Crunchyroll and The Gang launch Anime Monster Collector experience on Roblox: read here.

• Inter Milan partners with video monetisation business, Merzigo: read here.

• BBC Arts has launched a full classical music concert filmed in Apple Immersive for Apple Vision Pro: read here.

• Samsung launches Performance TV: read here.

• The FA launches the Official England App ahead of World Cup: read here.

• Panini blockchain bridge to open; partners with OpenSea: read here.

• American Express named Official Payments Partner of the NFL: read here.

• FC Basel launch second Roblox experience alongside DayZero: read here.

• State Farm adds SuperFan brand ambassador to EA Sports FC: read here.

• Meta to cut back on third-party vendors in favour of AI for content enforcement: read here.

• Why brands should embrace horror: read here.

• Peacock expands into AI-driven video, mobile-first live sports, and gaming: read here.

• Daegu Technopark supports sports tech startups utilising GPU and blockchain infrastructure: read here.

• Meta decides not to shut down Horizon Worlds on VR after all: read here.

• Five Iron Golf announces Series E investment to support expansion, investment in technology and programming: read here.

• Nazara to buy controlling stake in Spanish startups Bluetile, BestPlay for $100m: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hey folks. Welcome to Edition 102. We’re diving back into convergence (a favourite topic of ours!). This time, it’s where brands and movies meet.

This week's Spotlight: Coca-Cola & The Devil Wears Prada 2

Brands are pouring into film and TV at a record pace, and the smartest ones are now treating it as a cultural platform with a creative vision. In this edition, we look at what Coca-Cola's integration into The Devil Wears Prada 2 reveals about how to show up in a story authentically.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Roblox’s policy change, which will see them take a cut of all brand integrations

• TGR Haas F1 Team and TOHO unite to bring Godzilla to Japanese Grand Prix

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

Making the brand part of the story

On May 1st, The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits theatres, and Coca-Cola will be hard to miss. Both Diet Coke and SmartWater will feature prominently in the sequel, part of an alliance between Coca-Cola and Walt Disney Co., whose relationship has spanned decades already.

But Coca-Cola are one of many brands that are reaching into film, TV, and gaming at an ever-increasing rate. Global spending on product placement reached an estimated $33 billion in 2024, according to PQ Media's Global Product Placement Forecast 2024-2028, and was projected to have a further 12.5% rise for 2025.

Stefan Rothenbuehler, a SEG3 London alumnus who leads music, culture and entertainment partnerships at Coca-Cola, said that for product placement to be successful, you have to understand the consumer before you choose the partner.

"We always say consumer first," he told us in our podcast, The Speakeasy. "It's this consumer centricity where we tap into their passion points. We really try to understand what is moving them, what activities, what passion points are relevant for them. And so then when we have identified that, we check which of our brands matches this passion point and to this target audience, to really have a perfect match."

That sounds straightforward, but it has significant implications for how Coca-Cola structures its film partnerships. Each brand in the portfolio carries a distinct identity, and the question is always which one belongs in a given cultural context.

And for Diet Coke, that DNA is slim, fashion-adjacent and centred around pop culture, making it belong in the offices of ‘Runway’, the fictional fashion media outlet at the heart of The Devil Wears Prada 2, in a way that Sprite or Fanta simply wouldn't.

So, consumer insights drive the brand choice, and the brand choice drives the creative.

→ Remember: Match brand to the moment, not just media. The question isn't whether your brand "fits" movies. It's whether this specific product fits this specific movie. A targeted approach means being deliberate about which brand shows up where and why.

Building on the Fanta & Beetlejuice Beetlejuice foundation

The Devil Wears Prada 2 integration follows a playbook Coca-Cola refined through their Fanta and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice collaboration, which we covered in edition 75.

As Stefan shared with us on The Speakeasy, the Warner Bros. partnership worked because the alignment ran deeper than surface-level aesthetics. Fanta, a playful, innovation-led brand, found a story and an audience that matched at a DNA level in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice's quirky horror-comedy world. But spotting that fit was only the start.

What followed was a campaign that operated across every dimension of fan experience:

• Product: A limited-edition Beetlejuice Fanta flavour, with cans featuring the film's full cast of characters
  

• Digital: Connected packaging linked to a gamified "afterlife train" experience, an in-world journey drawing directly from the film's narrative, with prizes including premiere tickets and live event access
  

• Life: On-the-ground activations tied to the film's release moments

Organic fan participation - the kind that actually spreads across socials and communities - isn’t something you can force. It happens when the timing’s right, you’re in the right place, and what you’ve made is genuinely worth engaging with.

Stefan was explicit about why: "You can speak the language of Gen Z, but you need to play where they are living. Gen Z is very hard to impress. They always look for individuality and authenticity”.

→ Tip: Design for participation, not just visibility. The brands getting the most from film partnerships are further building experiences that fans can do something with: collect, share, unlock, trade etc.

The creative collaboration question

One thing the Beetlejuice partnership shows is the importance of honouring the IP you're entering. The creative vision belongs to the filmmaker first, and the brand's job is to find a way to add a fun, authentic twist without pulling that vision off course. Tim Burton approved every single element of the Fanta creative, Stefan said, and that kind of deep creative collaboration is what separates an integration that feels like it belongs from one that feels bolted on.

"It's hard because you need to respect the brand DNA of Fanta, but also you need to respect the idea from the filmmakers," Stefan said. "It was literally a co-creation that went over several months”.

And so, with production costs rising, and the traditional routes of film financing shifting, brands are becoming an increasingly important part of how films get made, and filmmakers are becoming more open to their integration as a result.

It was a hot topic when I attended the San Sebastian's Creative Investors' Conference in 2025. After all, there is a lot of capital that can be unlocked in brand partnerships, with a growing number of brands looking to enter the space in meaningful ways, rather than just dropping products gratuitously into shots.

One good example is Tricky Knot, whose recent brand collaborations include working with Adidas on Baton, a football film with David Beckham directed by and starring Danny Ramirez (of Top Gun: Maverick fame). A football movie with Adidas involved is a match made in football - and filmmaking - heaven.

That being said, the challenge is finding the balance where the commercial partner can hit their goals and show up authentically, without pulling the story off course. Get that balance right, and brands can reach audiences in a far more nuanced way than traditional advertising ever could, particularly as those audiences grow increasingly savvy to conventional product placement.

The risk from a production side is that brand involvement can compromise creative vision. But producer Christine Vachon of Killer Films noted that the filmmakers she works with were pragmatists: if visions can be aligned, the commercial relationship can serve the creative one rather than undermining it. After all, you’ll do what it takes to get your movie made, right?

→ Tip: Treat the filmmaker as a creative partner, not a gatekeeper. Getting the director or showrunner genuinely invested in the brand integration is the difference between a placement that feels authentic and one that pulls audiences out of the story.

Why awareness is no longer the point

For a brand like Coca-Cola, the goal of a film partnership has nothing to do with awareness. Everyone already knows Coke.

What they are looking for is an emotional connection, rather than an instinctive, awareness-driven one. They want audiences to feel something when they see Coke, and that’s why they have such a large presence across entertainment and culture, where fans have such a connection to brands and artists.

That framing matters for how success is measured. A placement that generates 50 million impressions but no emotional response has delivered reach - but not impact. What Coca-Cola is after, and what the Beetlejuice campaign demonstrated, is the kind of deep fan engagement that turns a product into a collectible, and a passive viewer into an active participant.

→ Remember: How you measure success matters. Impressions and CPM are important, but the brands extracting the most value from film partnerships are tracking fan participation, secondary market activity, UGC volume, and sentiment.

Closing thoughts

As filmmaking budgets shrink and attention spans shorten, authentic brand integration opportunities across multiple media platforms are not only attractive opportunities but also useful funding models. The more successful integrations there are, the more the gap between brands that approach this transactionally and those that approach it creatively will widen.

Coca-Cola's work across Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and The Devil Wears Prada 2 offers a model in-line with the latter. Long lead times. Consumer-first brand matching. Creative co-ownership with filmmakers. Campaigns that extend the film's world rather than interrupting it. And a clear understanding of what they're actually there to achieve: engagement and fandom, not just eyeballs.

The Speed Read 📖

TGR Haas F1 Team partners with TOHO to bring Godzilla to Japanese Grand Prix

The TGR Haas F1 Team and Japanese studio TOHO have announced a full-season partnership bringing Godzilla into Formula 1 for the first time, kicking off at the Japanese Grand Prix on March 27-29 with a special edition livery reveal in Tokyo.

TL;DR

• Timing is everything. The activation is tied to already culturally significant race weekends and the release of Godzilla Minus Zero in the US

• Both are using each other for access to an audience it wouldn't reach through their traditional siloed marketing alone

• Limited-edition merchandise builds fandom and is a metric with which to measure the partnership’s success

Why you should care

This is a smart piece of IP crossover work, and the timing is everything. The partnership is anchored around two significant race weekends: The Japanese Grand Prix is a home crowd moment, and the US Grand Prix coincides with Godzilla Minus Ones’ US release on November 6.

For Haas, this is about reach. As a team building its global fanbase, aligning with a franchise that spans 70+ years and carries enormous cultural weight globally - but particularly in Japan and the US, two of F1's most important growth markets - is a meaningful way to attract audiences that might never have engaged with the team before.

For TOHO, it's the same playbook we're seeing more entertainment studios run: use live sport as a vehicle to keep IP active, visible, and culturally relevant between major content releases. A race weekend is a ready-made global stage, and a special livery is the kind of visual moment that travels well on social.

The uptake of the limited-edition, race-specific merchandise will be the clearest signal of whether the partnership was a success. If merchandise sells out, it's a blueprint other entertainment and sports brands can look to.

In other news

• Star Wars assets are now live for Fortnite Developers: read here

• Apple joins the TCS London Marathon as an Official Partner: read here

• Tubi Inks Creator Development Deal With TikTok: read here

• Skittles and Omnicom Create Flute Controller 72-Hour Gaming Challenge with Sawhorse Productions: read here

• Kraft Heinz Is Building Emotional Connections At Scale With NFL Deal: read here

• Supercell releases Clash Royale ‘Cracked Screens’ campaign: read here

• China's OpenClaw Drives New ChatGPT Wave for Investors: read here

• L’Oreal Paris x The Devil Wears Prada 2: read here

• Sky Unveils Poster and Trailer for Original Feature Film Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom: read here

• IMG Licensing Expands PepsiCo Partnership to North America: read here

• Super League Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Misfits Ads Division: read here

• The Snow League Announces Google Cloud as Official Cloud and AI Partner: read here

• Octonauts: Wanda Buys Out Sony’s $49M Stake In Hit Kids Franchise & Hunts Platform Deals For Seasons 7 & 8: read here

• Birmingham City announces partnership with Guinness: read here

• EngageRM becomes the only Microsoft FastTrack Portfolio Partner in sport: read here

• Formula E returns to Ubisoft’s Trackmania for third year with new ‘Weekly Shorts’: read here

• YouTube makes World Cup deal with FIFA that lets broadcasters show parts of games live: read here

• Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are suing OpenAI: read here

• NBA and Coca-Cola announce new partnership with Sprite deal: read more

• AI Registry to Protect Athlete Likenesses and Digital IP Launched by New Sports-Tech Firm Callandor Group: read here

• Warner Bros’ games LEGO Batman release date confirmed: read here

• How Shell V-Power put every global Ferrari fan into the pit garage: read more

• Lenovo and NVIDIA bring production-scale AI to global sports: read more

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

In this episode of The Speakeasy, Elizabeth Walker, Director of Marketing and Publishing at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Lucasfilm, delves into the art of franchise building — and what it really takes to keep a beloved IP feeling alive, relevant, and growing across generations and platforms.

Covered during the episode ⤵️

• How to turn a great piece of IP into a fully-fledged franchise
  

• The art of balancing core fans' needs while engaging new ones
  

• How to expand IP into new formats in a way fans will actually embrace
  

• How they’ve used emerging tech and platforms to help fans further immerse themselves in the IP

For more on what it takes to build, sustain, and expand a franchise over generations, watch or listen now ⤵️

📹 Watch now on YouTube

🟢 Watch now on Spotify

🎧 Or listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Thanks for watching and/or listening along.

Make sure to follow The Speakeasy wherever you watch/listen - and leave a review if you enjoy the show!

Have feedback or guest suggestions?

Drop us a message via the button below. We’d love to hear from you!

Hey folks. Welcome to Edition 101.

This week's Spotlight: How the WBC and Netflix Japan navigated exclusivity, distribution, and fandom.

The World Baseball Classic has all the makings of a genuine mass moment; so, what happens when you put a paywall around it? In this edition, we examine what went down in Japan with Netflix’s exclusive airing of a national pastime.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Dentsu’s Ready Player Brand report on how gaming is capturing attention, and what that means for advertisers

• Premier League launches Last Fan Standing, and how it's helping them to drive retention in the Premier League app

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

Netflix Japan x WBC: A costly lesson in mass moments and mismatched models

In edition 98, we talked about what makes something a true "mass moment." The World Baseball Classic in Japan qualifies on almost every count: world-building, fierce national pride, cultural relevance, and consistency. Reports stated that nearly 100 million of Japan's 125 million people watched at least some of the WBC in 2023, when it was broadcast on various national outlets. That is a staggering number, and is only possible in a place where distribution is free and frictionless.

These moments derive their power from shared, simultaneous experience. They work because everyone — your neighbours, your colleagues, the corner store owner — is in it together, or at the very least, knows what’s happening. The moment you put a paywall around that, you endanger the structure that makes the moment feel massive in the first place.

That is the fundamental tension Netflix Japan walked into.

A survey conducted by Loyalty Marketing found that more than half of casual, light-touch baseball fans in Japan had no idea the WBC was being broadcast exclusively on Netflix in Japan. Of that same group, around 70% said the absence of free-to-air coverage reduced their desire to watch at all. The number that sticks, though, is this: 67% of respondents said they would watch the tournament if it were free, but would not if it required payment. For the broad, casual audience that makes a mass moment truly mass, it was a decisive barrier.

When those fans couldn't watch live, they didn't simply shrug and subscribe. The most popular viewing method among those who did engage with the tournament — chosen by 35.4% — was highlights and digests on platforms other than Netflix. Another 16.2% got their fix primarily through social media clips and score updates. 

Add those numbers together, and more than half of engaged fans were experiencing the WBC as a fragmented, asynchronous highlight reel rather than a live shared event. The communal roar of watching together in real time — what Forbes Japan described as the shared living room — had been quietly dismantled.

Expanding IP around the paywall

Netflix Japan’s WBC activation at the Tokyo Skytree (courtesy Netflix)

Netflix arrived with a genuine intent to expand the fandom, combating the paywall accessibility issue in several ways:

• On the ground: They hosted a "2026 World Baseball Classic Hometown Hero Public Viewing" event, staging screenings in each of the 30 Samurai Japan players' hometowns. This was a smart piece of community building — linking the national team back to its roots, and giving fans who might not have subscribed a legitimate reason to gather and watch.
  

• With the creator economy: They launched a "Netflix Official Creator" program, allowing influencers to legally use WBC footage on YouTube, X, and TikTok — branding it the "World Baseball Classic Ultimate Cheer Squad." Popular YouTuber HIKAKIN's WBC support video drew around 1.3 million views, suggesting the strategy was gaining traction with younger audiences. Former professional players also participated, offering commentary and analysis, turning official footage into a distributed content engine rather than a locked vault.
  

• Culturally: They recruited voice actress Noriko Hidaka (famous for voicing Minami Asakura in the baseball anime Touch) to narrate a special video package for the semifinal broadcasts, and aired a documentary narrated by Ken Watanabe. These moves showed a real understanding of the fact that baseball fandom in Japan is inseparable from pop culture, as we wrote about in edition 84, and that the right cultural reference can generate genuine emotional connection.
  

• The retention play: Netflix Japan planned that fans who joined because of baseball would discover other compelling programmes — sports documentaries, anime — and remain long after the final pitch. The WBC was designed as a door into a broader catalogue, not just a standalone broadcast event.

Planning for the exit problem

@espnatbat

Team #Japan thanks the fans after their #WBC exit (via @loandepotpark) #baseball

The fragility of the streamer’s position became fully visible when Japan lost to Venezuela in the quarterfinals. Minutes after the elimination, thousands of posts on social media called for people to cancel their subscriptions before they renewed. This was always the structural risk. Subscribers who joined specifically for the WBC had very little reason to stay once their team was out.

We wrote in edition 94 about the importance of designing for fan exit and re-entry — recognising that audiences drift, and that the job of a rights holder or brand is to give them an easy route back when the conditions are right. Many of the subscribers who joined for baseball need a compelling reason to stay. 

→ The lesson: when you build a subscriber acquisition campaign around a single event, your retention strategy needs to be just as robust as your acquisition strategy. It needs to survive the worst possible tournament result, not just the best case.

How to protect and grow an IP

What makes this situation complicated is all the moving parts. MLB owns the WBC — and it was MLB's decision to partner with Netflix. A league source told The Athletic that the decision was viewed as "a vehicle to help grow the game and reach a larger audience through a streaming service platform that is widely available."

Though Netflix Japan has yet to release viewership data (and likely won’t), the data we do have confirms that this framing sits awkwardly alongside what actually happened.

The WBC's value is rooted both in Japanese fans' deep, generational passion for the sport and its cultural ubiquity. Netflix Japan’s strategy lessened the latter half of that equation.

The IP management we wrote about in edition 97, and which our upcoming Speakeasy podcast with Star Wars’ Elizabeth Walker delves into, applies here. If you hold a piece of culturally significant IP you face a choice between protection and participation. Netflix Japan and MLB chose a form of protection: exclusive, premium, controlled. The risk is that over time, you protect the commercial asset while quietly allowing the cultural one to erode. 

Fans dressed as the Japan WBC Baseball team (source: Reddit)

Takeaways and learnings

A few things stand out as worth interrogating for anyone navigating similar decisions.

Knowing your regional audience is key. Several markets have found ways to preserve free-to-air access for key moments while still generating streaming revenue, like Sky Sports’ commercial license options in the UK and the US company Joe Hands, which works with private venues to broadcast sports. However, Japan’s cultural relationship with free TV made a hard exclusive a much riskier structural bet than it might be elsewhere. Knowing your region’s cultural nuances is key. 

Fan acquisition needs a longer arc. The creator programme and the hometown screenings were genuinely clever, but they were activated in the weeks immediately before and during the tournament. The window for building habits and converting casual viewers into subscribers is much longer. The groundwork for something like this needs to be laid a year or more in advance.

Casual fans are the economic multiplier. Casual fans who would watch for free aren't lost but rather priced out of the experience. As the SuperAwesome report on youth fandom shows, building connection early and keeping the door open for re-entry is what sustains an IP over the long run. An exclusive paywall works against both of those things simultaneously.

Closing thoughts

Netflix Japan did many things well. The creator programme, the cultural casting, the on-the-ground screenings — these show a company genuinely trying to expand the fandom, not merely extract value from it. But the activation was built on a distribution model that was, from the start, misaligned with the culture it was trying to serve.

The WBC in Japan is one of the most powerful mass moments in global sport. Fans at the Tokyo Dome stayed in their seats and cheered for nearly an hour after victories. That depth of feeling is the asset. Anything that puts distance between that feeling and the widest possible audience is a structural risk, regardless of how creative the activations around it might be.

Psst… We’re about to announce the first wave of speakers for SEG3 London tomorrow!

Keep an eye on our socials to find out which big names from across sport, entertainment, gaming and technology are joining us to explore themes like expanding IP, building fandom, and the platforms reshaping how audiences engage with culture.

The Speed Read 📖

Dentsu's Ready Player Brand report on how gaming is captivating attention from other platforms, and what that means for advertisers

A new report from Dentsu maps how 70% of UK adults now game in some form, and makes the case for why brands need to stop treating gaming as a media channel and start treating it as a cultural environment.

TL;DR

• Gaming is actively pulling time away from social media and streaming; this is a reallocation of attention that brands need to be cognisant of.

• Players are open to brand presence, but the permission is conditional on authenticity and fitting into the players’ culture.

• 42% of gamers play to relax and 21% to escape - understanding that headspace is key to crafting authentic and impactful campaigns.

Why you should care

While the audience size in gaming is compelling, it’s why people play that’s of most interest. 42% play to relax, 21% to escape. Gaming is an emotional environment, not just a content one. Brands are competing for eyeballs, yes, but also need to actively enter gamers’ headspace. That raises the bar on what works considerably.

The report also makes a strong case for creators as the primary route in. Discovery, trust and cultural acceptance in gaming flows through people, not platforms. Brands that over-control their creator partnerships lose the authenticity that makes those partnerships work in the first place.

Nearly half of Gen Z has strong interest in unlocking real-world benefits through gameplay, and the Naked Smoothie and Pringles case studies show that brands that show up at the right moment, in the right context, with something genuinely useful, are seeing significant lifts in awareness, purchase intent and consideration.

The throughline across all of it is that gaming rewards participation over placement, and advertisers’ campaigns will have to be authentic to gamers’ behaviours to be successful.

In other news

• Fortnite x Project Hail Mary Crossover Features co-op & Live Events: read here.

• The Nier: Automata and Overwatch Collaboration is here: read here.

• Adidas x Superstar launch a mini‑game on Roblox: read here.

• Adobe and Major League Baseball Expand Partnership to Power Next Generation Digital Fan Experiences: read here.

• McLaren Racing Launches First-Of-Its-Kind Fan Event In Miami: read here.

• Coca‑Cola and Real Thing Records Unite Music, Culture and Football with Coca‑Cola’s FIFA World Cup 2026 Anthem: read here.

• Studio Chizu and Nippon TV are launching Summer Wars Survivor experience on Roblox: read here.

• Razer’s VP of Software Unveils ‘Fully Agentic’ Version of AI Companion AVA: read here.

• GTA-Inspired Grand Heist City Game to Launch on Fortnite From Typical Gamer’s JOGO Studios, KitBash3D: read here

• Sephora signs sponsorship activity deal with F1 Academy: read here.

• Disney+ Teases Creator-Driven Content as It Launches Vertical Video Feature: read here.

• Canal+ Unveils Sky English-Language Drama Partnership, OpenAI and Google Cloud AI Deals: read here.

• Google Is Making a Big Push Into Vertical Microdramas in Collaboration with Range Media Partners: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hey folks - Joe here. Welcome to the 100th edition of The SEG3 Report.

When we started writing this newsletter two years ago (almost to the day!), our goal was simple - try to make sense of what happens when sport, entertainment, gaming & tech all intersect.

100 editions later…I think its safe to say things are moving faster than ever.

So before we dive into this week’s stories, a big thanks for reading along. Whether you’ve been reading since edition 1, or joined somewhere on the way, we appreciate you being along for the ride with us, and here’s to the next 100!

Right - enough sentimentality. Onto the good stuff.

This week's Spotlight: How Netflix Is Taking Its Biggest IP Into the Real World

In our last edition, we looked at the consumer-IP to content pipeline, which segues quite nicely into the next step: how to engage those IP fandoms.

From Stranger Things selling out 600 cinemas on New Year's Eve, to KPop Demon Hunters topping the box office after a month on the platform, to One Piece fans assembling in pirate costumes across four continents, Netflix is turning its biggest IP into live, communal events. We look at what's really driving the strategy, and what IP owners can steal from it.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Arsenal launches an app to house original content and experiences.

• The future of copyright for fully AI-generated content.

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

One Piece star Iñaki Godoy at Netflix's Season 2 Fan Screening in LA. Courtesy of Netflix

How Netflix Is Taking Its Biggest IP Into the Real World

For years, Netflix built its identity around keeping you on the sofa. And yet, today (March 10), One Piece Season 2 is heading to cinemas, with the first two episodes screening in over 200 theatres across the US, Canada, and Japan on the same day as its streaming premiere. 

Before that, the Stranger Things finale sold out thousands of showings on New Year's Eve. And before that, KPop Demon Hunters became Netflix's first title to hit number one at the domestic box office… after it had already been streaming for over a month.

The growing number of titles screening at theatres doesn’t mean Netflix has abandoned its core philosophy. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has repeatedly said that the company's goal remains to deliver "exclusive first-run movies on Netflix." The platform is not becoming a traditional studio. It is not chasing 90-day theatrical windows.

What Netflix is doing is using physical spaces as a multiplier rather than a marketplace.

The streamer uses physical moments like screenings, fan zones, parades, and immersive experiences to generate cultural heat, deepen fan connection, and extend the life of IP that has already proven itself on streaming. The physical world is a further celebration - an extension of that fandom.

KPop Demon Hunters is the clearest example of this logic in action. A sing-along version of the animated film was released in 1,700 theatres in August 2025, earning an estimated $19.2 million in the US and Canada despite having already been available on Netflix for over a month. Sarandos claimed the theatrical success happened "because it was released on Netflix first," crediting the platform's recommendation engine with building the audience that then showed up to sing along in cinemas.

In other words, the content built the fandom. The physical event gave fans somewhere to go with it.

One Piece: Engaging the Global Fandom

Fans at Netflix's One Piece Season 2 activation in Tokyo. Courtesy of Netflix

Alongside the cinema screenings, fans are invited to global events running across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa — from a pirate bootcamp in Mexico City and a red carpet premiere in Los Angeles, to the transformation of Milan's Piazza Gae Aulenti into Loguetown, the mythical city where every pirate's destiny begins. In Tokyo, fans can join the Season 2 Fan Voyage. In Jakarta and Bangkok, multi-day immersive Grand Line experiences are running. In Taiwan, there's a full Straw Hats Grand Parade, with fans encouraged to arrive in costume.

Not only do these events function as marketing, but they also provide fans with another place to gather, translating digital experiences to real-world ones. This is the model SEGA’s Justin Scarpone talked about at SEG3 LA 2024: “Storytellers of the future will not have platform bias - they’ll look at it in the way of how can we tell stories to the maximum size audience in the most diverse way.”

Each of those events is a touchpoint that deepens community, creates shared memories, and gives people a reason to feel like One Piece belongs to them — not just as something they watch, but as something they're part of. And crucially, it all lands simultaneously with the streaming premiere, so wherever fans are watching, buying, or gathering, the IP is present in the same cultural moment.

The In-Person Additive Factor and the Fandom Flywheel

For Netflix, the physical or live experience is additive. It deepens the cultural footprint of IP that already has an audience, rather than trying to build that audience from scratch.

This maps closely to what we've been tracking as the "fandom flywheel”, a concept Netflix itself leaned into in their Still Watching 2025 report, which we covered in Edition #83. 

Netflix still sees theatres as a bonus rather than the goal. But that framing undersells what's actually happening. Used well, the bonus is significant in terms of cultural weight for the IP itself, in the kind of shared experience that transforms passive viewers into active fans, and in the commercial partnerships that follow when a platform becomes the home for moments people genuinely care about.

Why It Works

Twitter tweet

There are three reasons this approach is gaining traction.

First, the IP earns the moment. None of these titles is being sent to cinemas or global fan events cold. One Piece has one of the most devoted fandoms in global entertainment. Stranger Things has been a cultural touchstone since 2016. KPop Demon Hunters became Netflix's most-watched movie ever on the strength of word of mouth. The physical event rewards the fandom and keeps them engaged.

Second, the format is designed for the audience, not the business model. The formats are built around how fans actually want to experience IP they love, whether that’s a sing-along or a pirate parade. This is fundamentally different from a standard theatrical run or a conventional broadcast deal, and it commands a different kind of engagement.

→ Ask yourself: What format serves the fan, not just what format serves the revenue model. The Stranger Things event generated $25M+ precisely because it was designed specifically as a celebration event, which is participatory, rather than a release.

Third, Netflix is building relationships with exhibitors rather than fighting them. The AMC partnership, which began with KPop Demon Hunters, represents a genuine shift. AMC CEO Adam Aron confirmed that the two companies have begun discussions about what other Netflix programming can be shown on AMC's giant screens, describing the working relationship as "easy, creative, and seamless." 

→ Remember: Whether you're a media brand or an entertainment IP, live and communal experiences represent an underutilised channel for deepening fan relationships.

What This Means in Practice

As Derick Tsai wrote in Edition #84, sports, entertainment, and gaming are already structurally siblings: they all create universes where characters embody archetypes, rivalries become sagas, and fans sustain the story through ritual and participation. What Netflix is doing is building the cross-industry infrastructure for that kind of fandom.

For digital IP owners, the takeaway is that physical and live experiences still have unique power when they're positioned as fan moments rather than revenue events.

Communities built online will show up in person - and in costume - if you give them the right reason.

And fittingly, today also marks 100 days until SEG3 London 2026.

On 18-19 June, we’ll bring together leaders from across sport, entertainment, gaming and technology to explore themes like expanding IP, building fandom, and the platforms reshaping how audiences engage with culture.

The Speed Read 📖

Arsenal launch 'The Arsenal' — a new direct-to-fan digital platform

Arsenal has launched a redesigned official club app called 'The Arsenal', positioning it as a central digital hub for supporters combining personalised content, matchday information, ticketing and fan engagement in a single platform.

TL;DR 

• Arsenal is moving to reclaim the fan relationship by bringing a number of their touchpoints back to an owned channel.

• The platform also extends Arsenal's reach into music, entertainment and fashion - giving people the opportunity to engage with the Arsenal brand before having to engage with the sport.

Why you should care

Arsenal aren’t alone in sport in wanting to bring more of the fan experience (and the data that comes with it) back inside their own ecosystem - and bringing content, ticketing, merch and matchday into a single owned app is a meaningful step in that direction.

What’s also interesting is the shift towards original programming and lifestyle content. From player-led shows to documentaries and collaborations with musicians and creatives, Arsenal now have a slate of formats it can lean into to keep fans engaged beyond the matchday.

Both of these moves mean Arsenal can service the needs of superfans while giving newer or casual audiences more ways to engage with the brand.

In other news

• Roblox launches a free-to-join global community for creators: read here

• Major League Rugby partners with OS Studios on broadcast production, social content and fan engagement strategy: read here.

• Ubisoft and the VRChat Store collaborate for Rabbids integration: read here.

• PGA TOUR launches PGA TOUR Pass, free-to-join fan membership programme: read here.

• FirstLook reveals its survey into gaming pre-launch metrics: read here.

• Netflix exits Meghan Markle’s scented candle business: read here.

• Ben Affleck sells AI post-production start-up InterPositive to Netflix: read here

• Gemba releases a fanbase market sizing report with F1 as its case study: read here.

• Los Angeles Football Club and RUCKUS Networks Deploy AI-optimised Wi-Fi at BMO Stadium: read here.

• LaLiga to stage retro week, vintage kits to be revealed at Madrid Fashion Week: read here.

• Former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy clarifies comments on exploring the possibility of AI in film: read here.

• AI talent studio and creator of AI performer Tilly Norwood hires former Amazon Prime Video exec Mark Whelan as head of strategy and operations: read here.

• Banijay Group CEO on how AI and the rise of creators drove the All3Media deal: read here.

• GameStop partnered with SoaR Gaming to host live '1v1 Me Bro' in Atlanta: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

In this episode of The Speakeasy, Jessica Jung, AI Innovation Lab Lead at Supercell, joined us to unpack what it really means to build at the frontier of AI and games - and why the most important questions aren't just about working faster, but about what is actually possible that wasn’t before.

Covered during the episode ⤵️

• How AI is expanding the kinds of experiences teams can build, and the commercial opportunities it can unlock
  

• What Supercell's AI Innovation Lab is, the challenges they’re aiming to solve, and why one of gaming's most successful studios is investing in this frontier
  

• How the relationship between IP owners, fans and creators is shifting as AI lowers the barrier to remixing and co-creation
  

• The biggest barriers stopping studios from embracing AI with confidence, and how to overcome them

And plenty more.

If you're trying to figure out where AI fits into your world - this one's for you.

—

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Drop us a message via the button below. We’d love to hear from you!

Hey folks. Welcome to Edition 99.

This week’s Spotlight: Why the IP-to-Film bet is getting bigger, and harder, to win

From Funko's new content deal to Hot Wheels and Labubu, the pipeline from beloved IP to blockbuster has never been fuller. We look at what the latest wave of toy-and-collectible adaptations gets right, what they're risking, and the one question every studio needs to answer before they greenlight anything.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Disney and Formula 1’s launch of vertical WEBTOON series

• System1 & TikTok’s latest report on how short-form entertainment builds brands and drives conversion

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

From store shelf to silver screen

Barbie made $1.4 billion globally in 2023 and fundamentally shifted something in Hollywood.

Not because it was a toy movie (those have been around!), but because it proved that a doll with a 60-year cultural history could be transformed into a genuine mass moment, one that transcended demographics, sparked a thousand op-eds, and turned a Saturday afternoon at the cinema into a must-do social event.

Since then, everybody has been chasing it.

Funko just signed a major deal with Rideback (the studio behind The LEGO Movie franchise and Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender) and AI-enabled production company Spuree to develop film, TV and animated content across its entire portfolio. Hot Wheels has Jon M. Chu (Wicked) at the wheel. Labubu is in development at Sony with Paul King (Paddington, Wonka) directing.

The toy aisle has never been so ambitious, but what does it actually take to turn a beloved piece of IP into a film that succeeds both with audiences and at the box office?

The Barbie effect (and what it tells us)

It's worth remembering what made Barbie work, because it wasn't just the IP.

Greta Gerwig brought a specific creative vision, and Margot Robbie — one of the world’s most recognisable stars — brought a nuanced performance. The marketing campaign turned the whole thing into a cultural conversation that even people who didn't watch it couldn't avoid. All of this was built on an IP that generations of people had grown up with, argued about, projected onto, and had genuine feelings for.

That last part is critical. Barbie didn't work because it was a recognisable brand. It worked because it had a deep fandom. The kind that's built over decades of real engagement, debate, and personal connection.

Speaking at SEG3 London 2025, Mattel’s Ruth Herniquez discussed how the company has driven innovation for the Barbie brand over the past decade, and why any change needs to be purpose-led and with the consumer in mind.

Similarly, A Minecraft Movie arrived for an audience that had collectively spent billions of hours inside the game's world, people with existing emotional investments long before a cinema ticket was involved.

The lesson? The IP is just the starting point. What matters is whether the fandom around it is real, whether people have actually lived inside it.

Who has that fandom?

Not all IP is created equal when it comes to what it can sustain on screen. There's a useful way to think about it.

• Nostalgia IP is rooted in memory. People loved it once, grew up, and now there's a warm fuzzy feeling that studios hope they can monetise.
  

• Active IP is still being lived in right now. Its fandom isn't dormant; it's ongoing, and a film adaptation becomes a new touchpoint within an existing relationship rather than an attempt to resurrect one.
  

• Cultural IP has transcended its original format entirely. Funko isn't just a collectable. It is an object that carries social signalling; it is a marker of identity, taste, and community.

The most successful ones tick multiple boxes.

Hot Wheels, for instance, is nostalgic and cultural. It generated $1.58 billion in global sales in 2024, has a Netflix series now in its third season, and sits firmly in the childhood memory of most millennials and older Gen Z. The creative challenge Jon M. Chu faces isn't awareness. It's giving people who already love it a reason to see it differently.

→ Food for thought: When working with high-awareness IP, the creative brief isn't "how do we introduce this?”, it's "how do we surprise people who already know everything about it?" The fandom gives you a headstart, but not a guaranteed audience.

Funko's smart bet

Of all the IP-to-screen announcements recently, Funko's deal with Rideback and Spuree is perhaps the least obviously cinematic.

Unlike the others, Funko doesn't have its own characters or worlds in the traditional sense. Its identity is built on being a bridge between fans and existing IP. Funko is a collectable layer on top of existing fandoms. Its catalogue covers everything from Disney to WBD to Netflix, and sits at what CEO Josh Simon calls "the centre of fan culture."

That's both the opportunity and the challenge.

The opportunity: Funko has genuine, deep relationships with fans who are already passionate. Those Pop figures aren't just products — they're representations of identity and belonging. The Funko collector community is real, active, and highly engaged.

The challenge: unlike LEGO, which had its own mythology and aesthetic to build into The LEGO Movie, Funko's identity is relational rather than standalone. Its story is about the intersection of fandom, collecting, and culture. This is rich territory, but harder to dramatise than a race car or a talking Barbie.

→ Ask yourself: What your IP means to the people who love it — not just what it is. The answer to that question is your film. Funko means community, obsession, and the joy of belonging to something. That's a movie.

Labubu who?

The Pop Mart plush sold more than 100 million units in 2025 alone. The hype is real, but it's also new.

As a director, King’s record with Paddington is about as good as it gets for this kind of transformative material. He understands how to find genuine emotional resonance inside something that could easily become saccharine, and how to make non-human characters feel relatable.

But Labubu is a trend. And trends move fast.

The film, even in fast development, is likely years away from screens. The question is whether the cultural moment that makes Labubu feel urgent today will still be intact when the film arrives. 

Japan is already releasing a Labubu competitor: Mirumi. Launched during Milan Fashion Week, the tiny nonhuman bag charm has wide eyes and soft pink fur. Its marketing slogan is: “A charm that steals your heart.” 

In defence of a Labubu movie, King's involvement suggests the goal isn't to chase the trend but to build something that justifies the IP's existence beyond it. To do for Labubu what Paddington does: find the universal emotional truth inside something specific.

Labubu isn’t the first trend-driven IP to make the jump to cinema. As we covered in Edition 85, Wind Sky Sun Entertainment partnered with Badimo to adapt the popular game Jailbreak into a movie, and Story Kitchen has teamed up with the developers of Grow a Garden to adapt the sensation for the big screen.

But as we said, “Building an evergreen IP takes time, depth and careful worldbuilding - so whilst growth of audience alongside loyalty is imperative for sustainability of any franchise, there are some important questions about what makes something like Grow a Garden or Jailbreak” — or Labubu— “truly adaptable.”

→ Tip: Trend-driven IP needs to earn a more durable emotional foundation quickly, or the film risks arriving to a world that's already moved on. The best IP-to-screen adaptations add something the original format couldn't — depth, stakes, community. If you're building on trend IP, that's your biggest job.

Where do we go from here?

We're in an era of fluid fandom, as we discussed in Edition 92. Audiences move in and out of IP relationships throughout their lives, re-entering when something gives them a good enough reason.

But audiences don’t only want to be reminded of something they used to love. They want to be given something that builds on their existing relationship with an IP rather than asking them to pretend it's still 1995. 

Today, utilising IP for entertainment is less about relying on nostalgia alone, and more about finding the next chapter of an ongoing relationship.

Closing thoughts

The IP-to-film pipeline is only getting more crowded. Studios are under pressure to reduce risk, and recognisable brands feel like a safer bet than original ideas. But the last few years have shown clearly that IP awareness is not the same as IP with active fandom. In particular, Gen Z, who now decide which cultural bets actually win, are good at spotting the difference.

Funko's move is interesting because it comes from a brand that knows fandom deeply, arguably better than most, and is choosing to lean into that as a creative foundation rather than just a commercial one. Hot Wheels has the creative talent to do something genuinely surprising with a universally loved product. And Labubu has a director who might just be good enough to turn a plush toy into something that makes you cry.

The brands that will be successful will be the ones that ask not "how do we monetise this audience?" but "what does this audience actually need from this story, right now?"

If you’re interested in how IP can be adapted for the big screen, or how those deals are made, explore the two-day program for SEG3 London 2026 below, where we’ll be unpacking the strategies behind the biggest hits.

The Speed Read 📖

Disney & Formula 1 continue multi-year “Fuel the Magic” collaboration

Disney and Formula 1 have announced an expanded collaboration for the 2026 season, covering immersive experiences, original WEBTOON content, new branded products and more.

TL:DR -

• WEBTOON launches Mickey & Friends x Formula 1 vertical comic series ahead of Australian Grand Prix 2026

• Disney to deliver entertainment experiences at select Formula 1 race weekends

• Fanzones to feature race-specific branded merchandise inspired by each host city

Why you should care

This is two behemoths in sports & entertainment crossing over - both global, both huge fanbases, both recognisable IP - so what do they need from each other that they don’t have already?

For F1, arguably the most interesting is the new webtoon episodic. It gives them mobile-first storytelling, keeps them visible between race weekends, and allows them to build a wider story beyond just the drivers and team principals (which of course the new season of Drive to Survive will do!).

For Disney, it’s about cultural relevance. Many of their IPs have been around decades, so finding new storylines and adventures requires creativity - and so with F1, they have new content to share, a chance to deliver entertainment experiences in various markets, and new race/city-specific products - all of which can shifts their IPs back into the active fandom bucket rather than nostalgic.

TikTok and System1 release The Long & The Short(Form) of it

The new effectiveness study looks at how short-form and long-form advertising actually perform together.

TL:DR -

• Campaigns using both long + short-form deliver stronger ROI than single-format campaigns

• Long-term brand effects account for the majority of profit impact in most categories

• Short, entertainment-driven ads drive +39% memory lift, 2x brand awareness lift & 2.8x brand image lift

• Long-form creative builds significantly stronger brand recall and emotional impact

Why you should care

Whilst short-form is a key part of the discovery puzzle - the report shows that if it is also built to entertain, it can help to strengthen the brand, with close to a 40% memory lift and double the lift in awareness.

That being said, the bulk of profit still comes from long-term brand effects - so finding that balance between long-form setting the story, and short-form keeping it in circulation and conversation, will be the difference between a short-term spike in attention and sales, vs long-term brand equity and sustainability.

In other news:

• Paramount set for $111bn Warner Bros takeover after Netflix drops bid: read here.

• NFL launches Innovation Hub Challenge: read here.

• Formula E launches Mexico City track into Roblox experience: read here.

• Mercedes-Benz launches Solo Leveling themed decals in Fortnite: read here.

• McLaren Racing launch McLaren Golf: read here.

• NHL & Cosm to install 360 cameras to all 32 NHL arenas: read here.

• U.K. news organisations form media coalition over AI publishing rights to 'protect journalism’: read here.

• Google Flow redesigned to put image generation front and centre: read here.

• Altman Solon releases 7th edition of Global Sports Survey: read here.

• UNO has arrived in Fortnite with UNO ROYALE: read here.

• Michelin becomes Official Partner of Rocket League Championship Series: read here.

• Sunderland AFC and Team Liquid announce a new partnership: read here.

• Gorillaz release a new animated short film ‘THE MOUNTAIN, THE MOON CAVE AND THE SAD GOD’: read here.

• Deloitte releases 2026 Sports Industry Outlook report: read here.

• Formula 1 names Damson Idris as Global Brand Ambassador: read here.

• Netflix to screen first two episodes of One Piece season 2 in theatres: read here.

• Fever becomes Official Ticketing Partner of Baller League US: read here.

• Can new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro weather AI, revitalise Star Wars and Marvel and save the Magic Kingdom?: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hey folks. Welcome to Edition 98.

A quick piece of admin before we dive in. First Release passes for SEG3 London (June 18-19) end this Friday. Full ticket info below if you’re planning to join leaders from sports, entertainment, gaming & lifestyle at the show this summer.

This week’s Spotlight: Milano Cortina Olympics x Looney Tunes

The Milano Cortina Winter Games proved that the Olympics remain the ultimate "Mass Moment," but Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) stole the show by leveraging an IP with sport in its DNA: Looney Tunes. We dive into how.

Plus Speed Reads of:

• Nippon TV launches a new vertical video division Viral Pocket, focused on micro drama production and Gen Z storytelling

• OpenAI & JioHotstar have partnered to launch a ChatGPT-powered content discovery tool, allowing for natural language search requests

Let’s get into it ⤵️

Milano Cortina Winter Olympics x Looney Tunes

I can’t be the only one with a newfound love for Curling, right? The drama with the Canadian team had me invested.

That’s the gift of the Winter Olympics. It gives niche sports access to global audiences and the opportunity to capture their attention, build interest, and hopefully inspire the next generation of elite athletes (or casual participants) to put on skis, boards, or skates.

But with the slopes now closed and attention turning elsewhere, who made the most of the Olympics “macro moment”, and how?

Well, despite WBD’s role in delivering record audiences across free-to-air channels alongside the EBU, it’s actually their activation of Bugs Bunny and friends that caught my eye.

A Mass Moment

The Olympics is still one of the last few remaining mass moments. It has enough weight culturally that it can command attention from all demographics, geographies, and generations.

For those of you who read Edition 80, you will know “Mass Moments” happen when you combine five key drivers - and the Olympics has the full-house:

• Worldbuilding - there’s decades of history, symbolism, and depth of storytelling.
  

• Consistency - with a cadence of every four years (or 2 years between Winter & Summer), there are regular touchpoints, with predictable surges in attention.
  

• High ratings - record numbers according to the IOC.
  

• Fierce fanbase - few things stir up emotion like country vs country competition…
  

• Cultural relevance - it overflows into pop culture, with everyone suddenly having an opinion on things like curling…

And by hitting those five pillars, an event like the Olympics transforms into a mass moment, winning over a disproportionate share of fan time.

And with that attention comes partners looking to integrate products and tell their stories. And so…

Looney Tunes x Milano Cortina

How can you make the most of such a big moment in the calendar and use it to strengthen the story around one of your biggest franchises?

For WBD, that meant leading with an IP that already had sport in its DNA - Looney Tunes.

Long before the Games, Bugs Bunny & co. were sharing the court with a certain Michael Jordan in Space Jam - a film that became a cultural phenomenon, and cemented Looney Tunes and the characters’ place in sports culture ad infinitum.

Building on this history, WBD were very deliberate in how they created their presence in the mountains and online, combining a mixture of life, product, and digital experiences to be visible to fans across all realities. This included:

Life: A crashing installation in Piazza XXV Aprile & participation in the torch relay.

Product: An exclusive range of licensed merch - including the Burton x Looney Tunes x Snoop Dogg snowboard drop, which sold out in just 2 minutes.

Digital: The launch of dedicated shows like Sports Talk with Bugs Bunny, Sports Made Simple, a livestream and the daily Watch Party - all embedded directly into free-to-air coverage, or through formats designed for platforms like YouTube.

As we covered in Edition #75, the real multiplier takes place when you can connect all those touchpoints - and given their strong presence, wherever fans were watching, buying, experiencing, or scrolling, Looney Tunes was there.

Why it worked (and some tips)

I think there are three simple reasons this crossover worked so well:

Firstly, sport is in the Looney Tunes DNA. It wasn’t a stretch of the story for the IP to be alongside the Olympic rings. This made the partnership and extension more of a return to home territory than a ‘why are they here?’.

→ Tip: Be deliberate about where your brand shows up. Expanding your IP only works when the narrative fits, and you add something your partner can’t deliver to fans alone.

Secondly, the IOC has been undergoing digital transformation. As those of you who joined us at SEG3 London 2024 will have heard from the IOC’s Head of Marketing Strategy, Jason Steele, this transformation means they are in a much stronger position to meaningfully integrate partners into physical and digital experiences.

→ Tip: Digital transformation seems laborious - but it’s a necessity to maintain relevance and revenue. As brands from outside sport raise the bar on data, personalisation and performance, sports has to modernise its infrastructure and practices to be able to continue delivering (measurable) value to their commercial partners.

Lastly, the products were fun, unique, and limited in availability. Any drop selling out in 2 minutes isn’t just luck - it’s the right combination of a premium manufacturer that audiences trust, talent that gives it more cultural sway, and an IP that fans have a connection to. This combo turns it from just a merch drop into a collectible.

→ Steal this: Whilst it’s a tale as old as time, merch is still a great way to tell stories. Scarcity mixed with the right product and talent and/or brand crossover, and you have a formula that still delivers.

That’s all, folks

But as we now head towards LA28 - and what is likely to be the most commercial Games in history - this won’t be the last time we see entertainment & gaming IP woven into sports’ biggest moments.

And the real winners of that convergence will be those who know where their IP can show up with authority, are creative enough to use it to elevate the fan experience and story, and have the infrastructure in place so they can guide fans from every physical and digital touchpoint back to their core ecosystem.

If you’re looking to expand your franchise into new corners of culture - and want to see how some of the world’s most established IP are approaching cross-industry collaboration - explore the two-day program for SEG3 London, where we’ll be unpacking the strategies driving innovation and growth.

The Speed Read 📖

Nippon TV launches new vertical video division Viral Pocket

The broadcaster’s new strategic division leverages expertise from hit series “We Are Coy Every Day” which amassed over 2.6 billion views, to offer full-scale marketing and IP development solutions.

TL:DR -

• Viral Pocket will focus on three key pillars to revolutionise micro-drama landscape

  • Content IP Development: Creating original, platform-native stories

  • 360 Production & Project Design: End-to-end execution tailored for vertical formats

  • Marketing Support: KPI-driven storytelling

• Aiming to deliver “Professionally Generated Content (PGC)” (a new acronym for us!).

Why you should care

Nearly 90% of Nippon TV’s content is fully owned IP. This gives them flexibility and leverage to be able to test out new formats and platforms, and see if their IP resonates with audiences in these new arenas.

And with vertical dramas becoming the hot new obsession for producers and brands alike (think P&G’s 50 episodes), having first-hand experience will make it easier for brands looking to integrate with Nippon TV’s preexisting IP, or collaborate to develop their own short-form storytelling.

JioHotstar partners with OpenAI to launch a ChatGPT-powered content discovery tool

India’s popular streaming service has a catalogue of over 300,000 hours of programming in 19 languages from a broadcast network of over 100 channels, original, and licensed content.

TL:DR -

• The tool is designed to work alongside live sports coverage so viewers can get match information, player data, and key moments in real time.

• Its search function will work across natural language conversations in multiple languages

• The rollout will span both live and on-demand formats, beginning with select experiences and expanding in phases.

Why you should care

Discovery is the biggest challenge for subscribers within a catalogue as large as JioHotstar’s.

By making that process conversational, subscribers will be training the model on their preferences, which can help it deliver more personalised recommendations, which can help to improve retention (at least theoretically!). The multi-lingual model should also bridge cultural gaps in entertainment, offering wider distribution for its titles.

The other knock-on effect of improved understanding of subscriber preferences is improved targeting for advertising.

Could this kind of AI integration eventually grow into a bona fide retention and targeting tool?

In other news:

• MLB players strike deal to be turned into AI characters: read here.

• Court finds VPN intermediaries responsible for piracy of LALIGA matches: read here.

• Night Media has raised $70 million to fund acquisitions and expand into gaming, sports, and music: read here.

• Sevilla FC announced a new media and fan engagement partnership with SAYTV: read here.

• Over 5 million fans register for LA28 ticket draw: read here.

• AMC Theatres refuse to screen an AI short film after online uproar: read here.

• Sonic the Hedgehog X Godzilla crossover announced: read here.

• IMAX and Apple TV collaborate to broadcast five Formula 1 races at 50+ IMAX locations in the US: read here.

• ESPN Africa launches premiere of short-form digital content series from Springbok and Yokohama Canon Eagles star Jesse Kriel: read here.

• Universal and Virgin Music complete $775 million acquisition of Downtown Music, one of the world’s largest artist-services companies: read here.

• Virtual idol Hatsune Miku will be performing at London’s The O2 on Thursday, 12 November 2026: read here.

• PepsiCo’s Bubly unveils colour-changing cans inspired by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie: read here.

• Premier League Futures and EA offer academy players experience in gaming and technology: read here.

• Havas on how gaming is redefining media value: read here.

• SAYTV becomes an official partner of Olympique de Marseille: read here.

• Hasbro named global master toy licensee for Harry Potter in multi-year deal with WBD: read here.

• McLaren Racing Club to deliver exclusive behind-the-scenes content and experiences for fans: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

If Episode 7 of The Speakeasy was all about attention, Episode 8 is about what happens once you have it.

Dominic Carbonaro (Ava Labs) and John Timoney-Gomez (UpTop) were our guests as we talk fandom - and how loyalty programs are becoming a core pillar of long-term revenue growth.

Covered during the episode ⤵️

• The first steps teams should take when rethinking loyalty (and the common traps to avoid)

• What fans actually value beyond giveaways & discounts

• How the Cleveland Cavaliers are linking digital and in-arena touchpoints into one connected journey

• What blockchain changes in loyalty infrastructure - and what it doesn’t

and plenty more.

So if you’re thinking about how to build relationships that last beyond matchday, this one is for you!

—

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Thanks for watching and/or listening along.

Make sure to follow The Speakeasy wherever you watch/listen - and leave a review if you enjoy the show!

Have feedback or guest suggestions?

Drop us a message via the button below. We’d love to hear from you!

Edition 97.

This week’s Spotlight: Seedance 2.0.

After cease-and-desists from Disney, Paramount Skydance, and many others this week, ByteDance has now promised safeguards for the tool - but with new tools popping up almost weekly, how can IP owners protect their works, whilst harnessing the creative energy of their audiences?

Plus Speed Reads of:

• The State of Brands in Virtual Worlds 2026 from GEEIQ, and the change in strategy from Media, Entertainment & Sports organisations.

• BCG’s release of Beyond Media Rights, and the three ways sports brands can leverage technology to grow revenues.

Let’s dive in ⤵️

IP Protection → IP Management?

Last week, Bytedance launched Seedance 2.0.

And as usually happens when these tools become available to the public (remember Sora 2’s launch?!), people began to create - and their default was to recreate their favourite characters and idols.

Within hours, our feeds were flooded with some of the most recognisable IP and talent doing things that would never receive approval from franchise management teams.

Studios and streamers (Disney, Paramount Skydance, WBD, Netflix etc), and unions like SAG-AFTRA, responded with cease-and-desists and statements condemning it.

And whilst Bytedance have now promised to put safeguards in place, Seedance is just one tool in a sea of models currently being built and released.

So, crisis averted, or just the latest bump in a very long road?

It’s the latter.

The reality is that with all of the investment going into AI, the tools are improving at a incredible rate of knots, and with every generation of AI model, production quality improves and so does the speed of creation.

The result of this is two-fold:

1) Talented storytellers now have tools to create faster than ever.

2) Everyone now has tools to create faster than ever.

And its that second point that will mean a deluge of content in our feeds. More visually impressive content than we’ve seen before, yes - but still hollow - lacking the soul, feeling and narrative depth that sustains the most beloved IP.

Either way - there will be a lot of it, and thus the threat is that discovery of your more carefully curated and produced content becomes exponentially harder for your fans to find.

However, this does open up the conversation around what the coming years will look like, and how important participation will become as a strategy to keep your IP culturally relevant.

So, what’s the opportunity?

Well, the crux of it is control of the conversation.

As Pete Basgen - VP at Livewire put it at SEG3 LA:

In other words, abstinence is no longer an option. Your IP will live inside these emerging platforms and tools regardless - officially licensed or not.

The real question then becomes whether you want to shape how it appears, or inherit the version that the community creates.

So, is IP currently managed in a way that supports that reality?

In general, no.

Many are still operating for a world where production/creation was scarce, and distribution was controlled. We’re definitively no longer in that era.

So, how can they evolve?

The biggest challenge is that the current model puts malicious infringements and fan-created content into the same bucket, and they’re dealt with in similar ways.

This is detrimental.

We now live in a world where fans want to participate, not just consume, and they now have all the tools they’ll need to be able to do so, with or without your permission. It would be naive to assume otherwise.

But this isn’t just an ideological shift for the sake of it - there’s a commercial upside, as allowing structured participation can be a hugely valuable thing for recognisable IP, as Jessica Jung, AI Innovation Lab Lead from Supercell, said at SEG3 LA this December:

And that’s the nuance many are missing; UGC content can, should and will be an amplifier for established IP, not a detractor.

This is because only IP with real cultural appeal, like from across sports, entertainment & gaming, have the fandom, depth and communities connected to them to be able to sustain participatory ecosystems.

So if you have a well-known IP, you’re in the privileged position where fans and creators want to dedicate time to building around you. If you lean into that intentionally, it can strengthen your flywheel rather than weaken your moat.

And that to some regard is the approach Disney recently took to their licensing deal with OpenAI. It’s the acceptance that generative tools aren’t going away - and being able to shape how your IP appears inside them may be more effective than simply reacting after the fact.

So yes, multiple things can be true at once

Deliberate infringement, as with Seedance 2.0, and unauthorised corporate use or model training without permission should be dealt with firmly. Creators and owners should be remunerated for their works.

But enforcement isn’t the problem - it’s the indiscriminate application of it that is.

In a world of saturation, your IP arguably becomes more valuable, not less. Audiences will continue to seek out emotion and feeling, and fan-driven industries have that in abundance.

At the same time, AI tools are going to become part of production workflows. It will be a sliding scale; some will use it everywhere possible, some will be more selective - but the economics and improvements in quality make it inevitable.

Similarly, with hundreds of millions now using GenAI tools on a daily basis, consumer expectations will grow that creation and participation should be things they can do around their passion points.

So, what does this all mean in practice?

It means it’s vital to separate infringement from participation by:

1. Setting clear creative guardrails for emerging platforms and tools, so people know what’s acceptable and what is not.
   

2. Defining licensing pathways so good-faith creators don’t have to operate in grey areas.
   

3. Exploring micro-licensing or retroactive monetisation models where these infringements can be turned into revenue.
   

4. Using technology to track and categorise usage properly - so you can find infringements, big or small, and respond proportionately rather than with blanket reactions.

More on this in Edition 63 from Graham Robinson of Yakoa.

Closing Thoughts

As production costs fall and creation becomes frictionless, enforcement alone won’t help to sustain your IP and its cultural relevance. For that, you’ll need to show up in environments where creativity is taking place - even if that requires you to be more flexible than your current approach will allow.

And as I’m sure this won’t be the last time we’ll write about an AI tool that treads the line between innovation and infringement, I believe the long-term winners will be those that have a clear strategy, and can therefore distinguish (both internally and externally) between what deserves protection and enforcement, and what merits structured participation and flexibility.

We’re going deeper on remix culture, IP management, and the protection vs participation debate at SEG3 London this June 18-19.

See what you can be part of this summer ⤵️

The Speed Read 📖

The State of Brands in Virtual Worlds 2026

GEEIQ have released their annual State of Brands report, with new research and insights from the leading developers, studios, brands and creators building in virtual worlds.

TL:DR -

• Integrations are now the favoured format; with 335 opting for that route vs 252 choosing owned-worlds in 2025

• For first-time entrants are still split 50/50 between owned-worlds & integrations

• 88% of all activations have taken place on Fortnite or Roblox

• Sports activations in virtual worlds grew by 45% YoY

• Media & Entertainment remains the most active category

• With all that said, brand spend did fall from $441m in 2024 to $229m in 2025

Why you should care

As budgets tighten, attention and performance matter more, which helps to explain why integrations took the crown in 2025.

Owned-experiences can still make sense for some, but standing out amongst 6m+ (and rising) experiences on Roblox is obviously challenging. And that’s just to get players there once - never mind two, three, four times etc.

So by focusing on integrations, brands and IP owners can concentrate on creative marketing, and how they can best enhance the story or experience with their presence, while native-creators and studios can do what they do best - build, maintain and grow fun games players want to return to regularly.

BCG: Beyond Media Rights

Boston Consulting Group released a thought-piece diving into how sports industry can reduce its reliance on media rights.

TL:DR -

• Tier 1 sports rights grew 113% in a decade, while the next tier grew only 40%

• Fan conversion between team can range anywhere from 1% to 60%

• Value capture from official data varies wildly by sport - from ~2% of gross gaming revenue up to 25% in horse racing - showing how under-monetised some leagues still are.

Why you should care

As the data shows, Tier 1 sports are somewhat insulated from this transition for the time-being, but for the rest, business model innovation is no longer a maybe, but a must.

Whilst media rights will remain a critical part of the equation, future growth will increasingly depend on how effectively teams build direct relationships, translate the newfound insight into personalised experiences, and use of that data to unlock new commercial opportunities.

In other news:

• Peacock debuts immersive viewing experience through Courtside Live at NBA All Star Game: see here.

• IOC launches Olympic AI for Milano Cortina: see here.

• Twin Atlas to launch episodic animated series of Creatures of Sonaria alongside Wind Sky Sun Entertainment: read here.

• Disney CEO says he wants movies to premiere in Fortnite: read here.

• Paramount plans to launch TMNT YouTube show & restaurants: read here.

• Disney & NASCAR celebrate Daytona 500 with Cars 20th anniversary event: read here.

• Hasbro Entertainment & Animaj launch JV for ad sales & brand partnerships, Lumee: read here.

• NFL scores 14m views for Creator Flag Football at Super Bowl LX: read here.

• Formula E & Arcade team up to deliver Evo Sessions in Jeddah for creators and personalities: read here.

• AEG & SEGA of America announce official partnership for LA Live: read here.

• Saber Interactive & Lionsgate to team up for John Wick game: read here.

• Pixar launches immersive experience in London: read here.

• DAZN launches The Residency - an interactive feature within their mobile app giving fans access to players: read here.

• Ares Interactive announces Baseball Hits 26 game in partnership with MLB Players, Inc: read here.

• NBCU shares full lineup of digital partnerships for Milano Cortina Winter Olympics: read here.

• Apex Legends celebrates 7-year anniversary: read here.

• Mattel to acquire full control of Mattel163 from NetEase: read here.

• Lucasfilm to release Star Wars: Galactic Racer game: see here.

• PSG launches global running program: read here.

• Juventus expand innovation focus through Forward Squad: read here.

• Japan’s streaming market hits $7.2bn: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Hello hello - welcome to Edition #96 of The SEG3 Report all!

In this week’s edition - it was Super Bowl weekend - so we zoom in on how Supercell hijacked the ‘big game’ conversation without buying a Super Bowl ad.

Plus: How Coca-Cola is entering the James Bond universe & Crunchyroll’s addition of original games to offer fans more ways to engage with their favourite IP.

Without further ado, let’s get into it ⤵️

Supercell & Lil Wayne team up for Halftime Show inside of Clash Royale

It was Super Bowl Sunday this weekend.

And whilst there has been a lot of debate about which ad won the Super Bowl, and Bad Bunny’s half-time show, it was actually another half time show that caught my eye.

To set the scene, anyone who’s spoken to me for more than five minutes knows I have a rather unhealthy attachment to Clash of Clans and Clash Royale.

So, when logging into Clash Royale for my daily instalment, I was not expecting to be greeted by Lil Wayne. And yet, there he was, and after 2m 47s of a half-time show complete with dancing troops and a Coldplay kiss-cam gag (will they ever get a rest?!), I found myself equal parts confused and impressed at what I’d just watched unfold inside a mobile game.

And once I’d taken my fan cap off and put my work cap back on, it got me thinking about what good creative mixed with well timed ambush marketing can do for your brand.

So, what’s the background?

Well, it’s the Super Bowl. Every single marketer is looking for a way to be part of the conversation. It has truly become a unique moment in the calendar for brands given advertising is such an integral part of the spectacle and fan experience.

But, all that attention comes with a hefty price tag - with a 30-second Super Bowl slot in this years show costing roughly $8 – 10m.

Despite the substantial reach it offers (~125 – 130 million viewers), that level of investment puts it out of reach for many brands.

However, if you’re set on being part of the conversation, but cannot buy your way into the moment, how do you still show up with authority around it?

Supercell’s approach

Instead of trying to outsmart other advertisers inside the same broadcast, Supercell leveraged what they already had; a platform, and a loyal fanbase that returns daily.

And with that, they turned Clash Royale into the stage. This gave them full control over the story they wanted to tell, the distribution, and how their IP could show up alongside the cultural moment they wanted to associate with.

And the activation they chose was the half-time show.

As much as the Super Bowl is known for its advertising, the half-time show is as much of a draw - with this year’s show by Bad Bunny reportedly peaked at a record 135.4 million viewers!

And so, if you’re going to aim to replicate and/or compete with one of the biggest stages in entertainment, the choice of who headlines it holds a lot of weight.

And this is where I think Supercell got it bang on.

The context that made it spread out of game

As with many things across entertainment, attaching the right talent can turn a great idea into a home run. And with Lil Wayne, Supercell found the perfect sub-plot to elevate this beyond just an in-game concert.

Lil Wayne, after being overlooked for the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in his hometown of New Orleans, vowed to “never do a Super Bowl halftime show”.

And so with that backstory already part of public consciousness, Lil Wayne leading the halftime show inside of Clash Royale instantly gives it another dimension, and primes it to spread far beyond just the game.

And spread it has - with the performance attracting 50 million+ in-game views in just 24 hours, plus another 9 million+ views on YouTube in just three days.

So, what should you steal?

In my view, there were three things Supercell and their agency partners executed on extremely well here.

First, they anchored themselves to a cultural moment that already had attention. Frankly, the Super Bowl has its own gravitational pull, and by getting creative, they were able to be part of the conversation without even using the official NFL branding. The timing of the release and smart use of copy like ‘the big game’ did the heavy lifting for them.

Second, they found a subplot worth leaning into. Lil Wayne’s history with the halftime show snub gave the activation cultural relevance and a narrative it simply would not have had otherwise.

And lastly, the activation debuted in-game, rewarding Clash Royale players with first access to the half-time show, and letting them carry the conversation onto other platforms. In other words, while Supercell has since put its marketing muscle behind the activation, the initial momentum came from fans and their organic distribution.

Closing thoughts

Lil Wayne saves me a lot of the summation I would usually insert here by saying:

This activation is a clean example of the convergence we spend so much time obsessing over at SEG3.

Music, sport and games are no longer separate arenas, but instead part of one big cultural playing field, and so it’ll be the brands and IP owners that learn to move naturally between them that will win the battle for attention.

Before we jump into the speed read, the themes we cover in this newsletter around fandom and convergence are exactly what SEG3 London is built around. We’re back this 18-19 June if you want to dig into them in person with leaders from across culture and technology. First Release passes are now live until the end of Feb ⤵️

The Speed Read 📖

Coca-Cola enters the Bond universe through in-game integration into 007: First Light

Coca-Cola has partnered with IO Interactive to enter the James Bond universe via a crossover with 007: First Light, weaving Coke directly into the gameplay.

TL:DR -

• The best brand moments feel native to the world fans are already in

• The campaign links physical product to the Coke app, and rewards those that engage with in-game perks

• As funding tightens across the full gamut of entertainment, brands are becoming key partners in bringing stories to market

Why you should care

If you’re a regular reader of the newsletter, you’ll already be familiar with Coca-Cola’s strategy for entertainment and culture marketing.

If you’re new here (or need a refresher), may I recommend Edition #75, where we dive into Fanta’s Halloween promotions with Universal Pictures & Blumhouse – or check out Episode 3 of The Speakeasy, where we got the chance to sit with Coca-Cola’s Director - Head of Music, Entertainment & Culture Partnerships, Stefan Rothenbuehler.

This crossover with IO Interactive is an interesting test case because the Bond franchise is famously protective of its image - but it’s also been synonymous with product placement since inception (I mean, can anyone think of Bond without thinking of Aston Martin?), so they know how to integrate brands authentically into their story.

And as we know, Coca-Cola tends to show up in cultural moments by pairing a product experience with a digital one.

A product experience - 007 themed cans now available across Germany

With…

A digital experience - a playable mini-game inside the Coke app that rewards fans with downloads and DLC.

No matter the IP or medium, the goal is to find authentic ways for the brand to exist inside the 007 universe (we unpacked the Bond franchise DNA in more detail in Edition #54), and Coke seem to have a very good habit of finding smart ways to integrate into their partners worlds while pulling fans back into their ecosystem.

And as funding pressure increases across film, TV and games, studios will need to design opportunities for brands to be part of their story without alienating fans or straying too far from the IP’s DNA.

It’s this balancing act that many studios and developers need to navigate to be able to get their stories to market over the coming years.

So, I leave you with some food for thought:

Are you still just creating inventory for brands to sponsor, or are you designing ways for brands to be part of your story?

Crunchyroll moves into original video games

Anime media giant Crunchyroll is developing original video game titles under its Crunchyroll Games banner, created in partnership with Japanese publishers and global developers.

TL:DR -

• Crunchyroll is expanding beyond streaming into games to deepen its fan ecosystem

• Original games give anime fans new ways to participate and re-enter fandom at different stages

• It’s another sign that adjacent entertainment industries are becoming integral parts of each others growth flywheels

Why you should care

Crunchyroll is expanding its ecosystem beyond streaming, and games are the next layer.

Anime already attracts highly engaged fans, and superfans want more opportunity to participate beyond just episodic releases. They want spaces where they can explore the lore, interact with the IP and find community to share in their fandom alongside.

So as fandom becomes less linear and more cyclical (as we covered in Edition #94), launching original games will give Crunchyroll another way to meet fans at different stages of their journey - whether it be that they’re discovering anime for the first time through the game, or re-entering the ecosystem after a sustained break.

All of these options strengthen the flywheel; anime drives discovery, games deepen the engagement, and both feed into other parts of the ecosystem (merch, IRL experiences etc).

And by keeping the titles exclusive to their platform (Crunchyroll Game Vault), it also gives them tighter control over how fans engage with the IP - which is in line with what Darren Traub shared at SEG3 LA, that Crunchyroll structures its deals for long-term fandom, not short-term distribution.

I hate the word signal - but if there was ever cause to use it, this would be it.

Fandom-driven businesses are bleeding into each other faster than ever, and industries that once sat adjacent (but separately) are now becoming integral parts of each others flywheels.

In other news:

• Sony Pictures Animation launches GOAT | Roarball Rumble with Sawhorse Productions and Chartis ahead of its Steph Curry-produced film release: read here.

• Dentsu launches production solution, Content Engine: read here.

• Arcturus’ volumetric video teaser shares 360° viewing experience: read here.

• How EA Sports are redefining how fan connect with American Football: read here.

• Dovetail Games to release Thomas & Friends™: Wonders of Sodor adventure game: read here.

• BLAST announces Polymarket as Official Prediction Partner: read here.

• NBC Sports & The Famous Group deliver live mixed-reality broadcast for Super Bowl: read here.

• Roblox launch 4D generation: read here.

• Nike takes over heritage Italian train for a rolling basecamp at the Winter Olympics; relaunches Nike ACG: read here.

• Premier League releases behind-the-scenes content of Newcastle United fans trip to the NFL’s Green Bay Packers ahead of the Super Bowl: read here.

• Baller League agrees deal with CBS Sports for US league launch: read here.

• WPP partners with Genius Sports to create Brand Sports Momentum Score: read here.

• Chappell Roan becomes icon in Fortnite Festival Season 13: read here.

• Arsenal launch Reddit channel: read here.

• Ares Interactive raise $70m Series A: read here.

• Ear to the Ground launch Fan Intelligence Index: read here.

• Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile ramped up wireless capabilities for Super Bowl: read here.

• Publicis Connected Media partners with Magic Johnson Enterprises: read here.

• FIS’ record storytelling impact after implementing Content Exchange Platform for athletes: read here.

• Anzu introduces click-enabled intrinsic in-game ads: read here.

• Genius Sports acquires digital sports and gaming media business, Legend, for up to $1.2bn: read here.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!

Episode 7 of The Speakeasy is now LIVE!

In this episode, we’re joined by Yuriy Yarovoy - SVP of Revenue at Medal, to talk attention - and how short-form content is changing the way games, sports, films, series and brands are discovered and grown.

Covered during the episode ⤵️

• How a clip from a friend can pull someone straight into a community - no funnel required

• What makes people actually want to share something - and how to build for that

• Why advertising needs to move beyond impressions (and what to measure instead)

• The tactics and formats smart marketers are using to build long-lasting fanbases

And a whole lot more.

—

📹 Watch now on YouTube

🟢 Watch now on Spotify

🎧 Or listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Thanks for watching and/or listening along.

Make sure to follow The Speakeasy wherever you watch/listen - and leave a review if you enjoy the show!

Have feedback or guest suggestions?

Drop us a message via the button below. We’d love to hear from you!