Welcome, folks.
Shelley Macintyre, CEO of Brands & Licensing at BBC Studios, sits down with Joe and Gabriella in episode 19 of The Speakeasy to share how BBC Studios knows when an IP is ready to stretch, and how her team balances giving fans room to create whilst protecting the brands DNA.
📹 Watch now on YouTube
🟢 Watch now on Spotify
Snippets from The Speakeasy
Detecting when a hit becomes a franchise
The instinct might be to think BBC Studios decides when a show becomes a franchise. Shelley explains it’s actually the opposite: the business follows the fans, not the other way around. Bluey's shift from hit show to global franchise showed up first in places nobody at BBC Studios planned for: a TikTok clip from Bluey going viral among 20-somethings, a university marching band playing the theme song, and the Jonas Brothers using it to introduce themselves on stage in Australia. None of these moments was orchestrated or planned for; instead, they were the signals that BBC Studios had an IP that could grow beyond its core audience of preschool-aged kids and their exhausted parents.
The same logic runs through Doctor Who, despite the huge difference in age of the IP. Doctor Who spans 60 years' worth of episodes, which means the show now serves two audiences with fundamentally different relationships to the IP. One of the ways BBC Studios services both fans is by building Circuit Breaker, which gives core fans somewhere to go deeper during lulls between seasons. This leaves casual viewers to dip in and out of the show when the moment's right.
In both cases, Shelley’s job wasn’t to manufacture ‘fan demand’. Her job was to notice it, and then build the infrastructure to deepen and broaden it.
Knowing what a brand can do is easy. Knowing what it shouldn't is the actual skill
Shelley's team spends as much energy saying no as saying yes. She frames it as "permission," but not the kind that comes from an exec’s sign-off. It’s the kind that feels authentic to the audience, and it's specific to each brand. Bluey has permission to stretch into kidult merchandise and slightly edgier humour, because that expansion still sits inside the emotional core of the show. Other kids' IP may not have that same flexibility, and reaching for it anyway reads as opportunism rather than growth. As Shelley puts it, "just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should as a brand." That discipline is what separates a franchise built for decades from one that peaks and burns out.
Where the future of IP comes from, and how content creators should respond to it
Shelley agrees with what most of the industry seems to be waking up to, which is that gaming and creator culture is where future IP will be born. However, that doesn’t mean it’s all in for brands wanting to collaborate, or studios looking to mine ideas.
In particular, Shelley says that creators have a real structural edge: they’re closer to their audience data, faster to adapt, unburdened by the institutional layers that slow legacy media down. But that same closeness is also the risk. A creator's business often is the audience relationship, with none of the legacy or infrastructure to fall back on if it frays.
Shelley points to Mr Beast's Amazon partnership as one example of the tension this audience dependency can create. Effectively, he traded loyalty from part of his fanbase for a level of institutional reach he couldn't have built solo. Speed may be able to get creators to the IP conversation, but to grow it from IP to franchise often still takes partnerships with studios and professionals who've been building brands for decades.
Thanks for reading, 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!