Hi everyone, welcome to Edition 118. This week I’m talking Versace apartments, actors fronting iced tea, and Bad Bunny. Or, more accurately, how brands are strategising to actively combat the attention crisis by partnering, showing up, and building experiences that resonate as per Hypbeast’s whitepaper: Brands in the Entertainment Age.

Plus a couple of tennis-themed Speed Reads 🎾

First serve! (Okay, that’s it for my tennis jargon.)

My neighbourhood of Vauxhall has changed a lot in the ten years I’ve lived here. When I moved in, the area around the train, tube, and bus stations was mostly desolate, save for the brilliant Lasco/Brunswick House (which I highly recommend!). 

Now, there’s bonafide Versace designed apartments. (By the way, many still haven’t sold…)

I was reminded about these, frankly, bananas-looking apartments when I read Hypebeast's new white paper, Brands in the Entertainment Age. As Hypemind's Maria Eugenia Errobidarte puts it in the report, buyers of branded real estate "are not borrowing the brand for a night. They have chosen to live inside it." 

Which, if you love Versace, is great for you, and great for Versace.

Its signal, though, is something broader about how brands are showing up when attention is shrinking, and the digital world has become more cluttered than ever.

Regular readers will know we've spent a fair bit of 2026 on the mechanics of attention. In Edition 106, we dug into Dentsu's Brand Reset report and the idea that not all attention is created equal. In Edition 105, we looked at Entertain or Die's argument that boring brands don't grow, and that the winners are built from subcultures outward.

This report picks up roughly where those left off, and pushes into the part we haven't spent as much time on: once you've earned attention, what do you actually do with it? How do you keep it? Leverage it? Build upon it?

One answer is to partner with talent to create lasting and authentic collaboration that creates emotion.

We already know audiences are savvy to natural fitting (or, rather, forced) brand-IP collaboration. This extends further. Audiences can tell the difference between talent who have been hired and talent who are genuinely invested. Rachel Sennott writing and starring in Marc Jacobs' "The Scene", makes her a creative partner. Giannis Antetokounmpo fronting WhatsApp's first global talent partnership worked because it drew on his own immigrant story.

And, of course, adidas x Bad Bunny. In its 2025 annual results, adidas specifically named the partnership among the halo collaborations driving Lifestyle revenue growth for the brand. When the BadBo 1.0 debuted during Bad Bunny's Super Bowl LX halftime show, the moment alone generated an estimated $1.6 million in media impact value.

An exhibition at Puerto Rico's Museo de Arte, a "golden ticket" activation at Grand Central, an interactive installation at Coachella; these events were all built around a single touchpoint - Bad Bunny - launched at the biggest live moment on the calendar all circled back to the same brand. 

From the media side, we’re also seeing this strategy in action. We recently covered Balenciaga becoming Substack's first luxury fashion partner, and the read there was that brand money going directly to individual creators, rather than platform inventory, is a signal that trusted, and properly aligned, voices in niche communities now outweigh impressions bought at scale. 

Similarly, Fox Creator Studios' new deal structure splits IP 50/50 with creators from day one rather than treating them as a distribution channel. The big names, whether you’re a fashion house, a film studio, or a sports IP, are partnering on equal footing with talent.

As Bad Bunny x adidas shows, these collaborations can go beyond digital formats, with more and more brands showing up in the physical world.

Globally, Hypebeast’s found innovation is now 2.5x more influential than exclusivity in driving what it calls “brand heat”. Interactivity and value-matching lead (China over-indexing on the former, US/UK on the latter) when it comes to what actually drives brand affinity. 

Authentic, liveable, and properly compensated talent partnerships buy a whole lot of goodwill with the consumers and fans you’re trying to capture.

Sidebar: I’m about to contradict myself. There are times, of course, when recognition alone still carries weight. If you’ve been to Japan, you’ll know that brand-talent collaboration is everywhere. You can’t move for seeing Shohei Ohtani advertising something. But it works! When I was there last, I was standing in front of a vending machine atop which was a banner of an actor I quite like, Takeru Satoh, advertising a particular brand of tea. Guess which tea I bought…

This all brings me back to the Versace apartments (I know it took a while to get here!). Branded residences are one of the fastest-growing categories in luxury real estate. The sector has grown more than 180% over the past decade, from 323 active projects globally in 2015 to 910 by the end of 2025.

It's the most extreme version of a pattern we're seeing everywhere: brands treating physical space as proof of commitment rather than a marketing line item. It’s the same strategy we’ve talked about before, showing up in different places authentically, whether that’s an apartment you live in or an activation you experience.

And this all makes sense from a branding perspective. 84% of consumer marketers and 86% of B2B marketers say they plan to increase event spending in 2026, according to Event Marketer's EventTrack benchmark, even as digital ad budgets get squeezed. 

What a savvy marketer will pick up on is a cultural moment that provides diverse opportunities for in-person integration. Yes, I’m talking about The Devil Wears Prada 2!

Coca-Cola, L'Oréal and Dolce & Gabbana all ran integrations with the sequel, which makes the film a rare live test of how differently brands are approaching the same cultural moment.

We covered Coca-Cola's integration in Edition 102: Diet Coke and SmartWater built into the film itself, backed by the same consumer-first matching logic Coke had already proven with Fanta x Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. (And it just so happens, we’ve got a podcast with the man behind Coke’s music, entertainment, and culture partnerships here!)

The backbone of the Coke integration was that those specific products actually belonged in the fictional offices at Runway. Linking them in moviegoers’ minds with a film they love is a ‘fan participation’ metric. When, in six months, someone chooses Smartwater over Fiji because it makes them feel like Miranda Priestly, you’ve got your win.

D&G took a different approach. Rather than integrating into the story, they staged Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci appearing in character at an actual Milan runway show (talk about breaking the fourth wall), erasing the line between the fictional Runway and the real fashion week in real time. It also appeared in the film, which helps create that two-way experience I talked about last week.

Remember this: The D&G moment worked because, per the white paper, the cultural reference was "already loaded" and the timing was exact. It paid off because the audience already had the cultural fluency to get the joke without being told.

If you're building a brand, an IP, or a platform in sport, entertainment or gaming right now, I'd take three things from this:

First, treat talent partnerships as co-authorship. As with all of the successful integrations we talk about, the key its finding talent whose story genuinely overlaps with yours, even if that's not obvious on paper (Puma x A$AP Rocky's Harlem-jazz-meets-Formula-1 campaign is a good reminder that unlikely pairings often land harder).

Second, build holistically. A single drop timed to a single moment is a tactic that, yes, will yield results. But pairing a drop with an exhibition, an activation and a residency that all point at the same story (ahem, and brand) is a strategy with longevity and cohesion.

Third, and this is what I keep coming back to (and if I could afford a Versace apartment, of course, I’d buy one): physical presence is becoming a trust signal in its own right. 

In a feed full of things that cost little to make (with all that Gen AI out there… though that’s a topic for another newsletter!) and nothing to say, a brand willing to build something you can actually walk into and experience is telling you something about how seriously it takes you.

Those memories, those experiences, those feelings, are what create lasting brand loyalty. 

This year, their partnership was extended until 2030 to carry out a new digital transformation plan

TL;DR

Why you should care

The interesting question here isn't "does AI improve sport?" Clearly it can, on reach and efficiency. But fans experience AI as a single undifferentiated presence, even when it's ten different vendors and systems stitched together. A Hawk-Eye miscall becomes an "AI at Wimbledon" story, and IBM absorbs reputational risk for a system it didn't build.

2026 was a far smoother tournament when it comes to AI. And there is a lot to dig into with AI at Wimbledon. We were lucky enough to chat to Wimbledon’s own Digital Strategy and Products Lead, Chris Clements, about this very subject, and I recommend giving it a listen! He revealed some insight that’s worth resharing here.

Part of Wimbledon’s success is because it chose not to be first on AI features more than once. Its ‘Likelihood to Win’ and ‘Match Chat’ tools are a proving ground for IBM, but Chris says they're just as much a proving ground for Wimbledon's own restraint.

Knowing when to say no, or wait, is key to a lot of tech rollouts, even when it goes against the impulse to be fast, be first. For Wimbledon and IBM, being first is a risk to manage (and it’s a real risk, as 2025’s experience proves).

“Personalisation” matters just as much. Chris acknowledged that personalisation promises are landing hollow, even with the people building the tech. What fans respond to is relevant curation delivered quickly, not a promise of individual attention that can't actually scale to hundreds of millions of people worldwide in a two-week window.

“It’s all about boosting access in a way that doesn’t exist with some of these coveted events,” Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s vice president of global sports and entertainment partnerships, said.

The takeaways are that if you're layering multiple tech partners into a live fan experience, being first isn’t always best, and knowing what your tech goals are is key to figuring out what tech you should be building in the first place.

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!