Hey folks - Joe here - for the bingo enthusiasts amongst you, today is edition clickety-click (66) of The SEG3 Report.

This latest instalment rounds off our series of takeaways from SEG3 London, as well as a look into Banijay Entertainment’s decision to incentivise creators to recreate some of their most popular french TV shows for YouTube + SEGA become McLaren Racing’s official gaming partner with Sonic the Hedgehog.

Without further ado:

Contents: Edition #66

• Key Learnings from SEG3 London Part 3

• Banijay Entertainment offers creators opportunity to reinvent classics for YouTube

• Sonic the Hedgehog becomes Official Gaming Partner of McLaren Racing

Key Learnings from SEG3 London Part 3

The third and final recap of SEG3 London 2025 is here. Sessions 13 to 18 - focused on how you can revitalise heritage brands, build superfans, bring more entertainment into sports, drive corporate innovation & more.

Catch up on the first recap here & second recap here.

If you’re up to speed, let’s dive into the key pieces of advice 👇

13) How to Build Superfans

→ Don’t underestimate the power of free. Although there are short/medium/long-term commercial and growth targets, businesses within sports, entertainment & gaming rely on fandom for their existence. Focus on building a really engaged community first, which builds momentum, which leads to the audience wanting to showcase their fandom which leads to positive commercial outcomes. Focusing on monetisation too early just leaves a bad taste.

→ When building new products or experiences, don’t lead with technology - be led by the business outcome that you want to achieve. Technology is just a vehicle to help you achieve what you want or what your fans need - review it, compare its properties against what you’re trying to achieve, and if it doesn’t meet the criteria, don’t try to shoehorn it in. It won’t be beneficial for the brand or your fans.

14) Building the Next Era of Brand Loyalty

→ Heritage is a strength, not a constraint. Especially in today’s world where content is a commodity, brands that have history and audience are gold-dust. That said, there is a constant need to evolve with the times - but innovation must be done with purpose. Ask questions like: why should this be changed? How is it helping me to connect with my audience? If we do tweak something, what opportunities will this unlock that the older version would not have allowed us to do?

→ Traditional loyalty programs are shown to work - XP, points, leaderboards etc. But the future of loyalty will need to be experiential too. Experiences create emotional connection, so the objective of the loyalty program should be to be the glue between all the various touchpoints of your brand (physical and digital) so that you can connect and reward your customers wherever they are.

15) Entertainment or Die: Building Baller League

→ Everything is storytelling, and there are only two boxes you need to tick as a consumer brand right now. Authenticity & excitement. Fail to meet those two criteria, and future generations will have no interest.

→ For rights holders (and especially new leagues), it doesn’t matter where people are consuming your content, as long as they are consuming it. If your objective is to engage youth audiences, don’t worry about exclusivity, worry about awareness. Broader distribution (like Baller League has with Sky Sports, YouTube and their talent) is good for partners and for building fandom.

16) Sponsorships that Stick: Building Brands through Sports & Gaming

→ Sports & Gaming offer a valuable route for brands into popular culture. But each brands objectives differ - whether that be rejuvenation, awareness, sales etc - so although there are set rights which you as the rights holder may have priced into a package, flexibility and creativity is the number one thing to get a brand bought in. The one size fits all approach is (rightly) dead in the water.

→ Currently, success in sponsorship is generally defined by media value. This is outdated. There is an ongoing shift where brands are changing their methodology to focus on proving the sponsorship contributes to leads, engagement, sales and ultimately loyalty. Rights holders will need to drastically improve their reporting capabilities if they are to continue to command the cheques they have in the past.

17) Intrapreneurship & Innovation: Incubating Ideas from Within

→ Creating a culture of innovation is a ground-up approach. Making sure your team understands the organisations goals for the next quarter or year is essential so it’s front of mind in their decision making. The team that are at the coalface and focused on the day-to-day will have incredible, granular insights into how each product or experience can be improved. Lean into their learnings!

→ Although the objective with innovation is to drive reach, relevance or revenue - there can still be positives in failure. If it can spark some new ideas, or help teams break out of a one-track mindset, that is success in itself. Another benefit can be that building a prototype can give C-Level something to respond to, which can actually uncover what is value-add, and what is just surface level to them.

18) How to Launch New Products

→ When you launch a product, signals can only get you so far. Having a north star of what the product will look like and where you want to get to is great, but the key is to listen to consumers and course-correct as you go to deliver what they want. Iteration is the key.

→ The goal is to build a coherent product ecosystem that takes your customer on a journey. Customers will be at different stages of interacting with your brand (i.e. a new fan vs a longstanding fan), so having products that service their needs are essential to keep them engaged. Which audience you are targeting with the product, and why, will inform how the product is built to begin with - but as above, it will need to evolve with your fans to remain useful.

So that’s sessions 13 to 18 done, and I think they demonstrate more than anything that fandom, innovation and creativity are going to be core to success.

Whether it’s revitalising brands, building loyalty through unique experiences or engaging with communities in new and novel ways, the key moving forward is to keep your fans at the centre, and everything else will follow.

Banijay Entertainment offers creators opportunity to reinvent classics for YouTube

Banijay Entertainment has launched the Banijay Creators Lab in partnership with YouTube, inviting content creators to adapt classic French television formats for a digital audience. Selected creators will receive up to €50,000 to produce a pilot episode, with mentorship from TV format professionals. The initiative focuses on shows like Minute To Win It, Dilemma, 1ère Compagnie, Got To Dance, and La Tête Et Les Jambes.

Why should you care?

TL;DR: Legacy broadcasters are waking up to the power of UGC platforms, not just as distribution, but as a place to reinvent their library. Banijay’s Creators Lab is yet more proof that IP holders want to empower a new generation of storytellers by giving them official tools and formats to play with. For creators, using real IP = credibility and community. For IP owners - it shows that UGC platforms are perhaps no longer a threat, but a proving ground.

In full: The conversation has long been about how UGC is cannibalising traditional channels - and whilst that’s true, the two have also started to blend in a much more meaningful way over the past 12 months.

Think Channel 4 launching 4.0 for dedicated social content, MrBeast’s partnership with Amazon, the BBC with Last Pundit Standing on TikTok, The Sidemen reviving Supermarket Sweep - I could go on, but you get the idea.

So with Banijay, owners of some of most recognisable TV shows like Big Brother, Masterchef, Peaky Blinders & more, now providing the opportunity, and importantly, funding, for creators to take those popular shows, and reimagine them for YouTube, it signals a few things worth paying attention to:

UGC is impossible to ignore for broadcasters

Youth audiences are on YouTube and TikTok, and creators have the attention.

Rather than Banijay being protective around their IP, the objective is to get it in front of new audiences, and see if the format still resonates. If it does, the €50k investment they are offering is a drop in the bucket to prove out demand, which can then be the used as the rationale to build the show back into broadcast, or extend it to new territories.

So if you’re sat with IP collecting dust, and unsure whether it has reached the end of its lifecycle (or not), this seems like a smart and relatively low-risk way for Banijay to uncover if there is demand without committing to full-scale production.

So why is it interesting for creators?

Well, luckily we covered just that two weeks ago 👇

Working with an established broadcaster & their IP brings legitimacy that would take years (and a lot of investment) to build on your own. This model makes it much easier for creators to run with a format that is already known, and tailor it to the platform and audience they already know inside out.

And if they do it well? There’s now a very real creator-to-TV pipeline forming.

But this isn’t just about broadcasters going digital. If it’s successful, it’s a massive shift in how talent, production & IP incubation happens, with UGC now at the centre rather than at the fringes.

So for all of you reading:

• Look at creators as co-developers - not just distributors/influencers.
  → Their insight and know-how can help revitalise heritage IP for new audiences
  

• Brush the dust off your library, and give it to creators to work with
  → It’s a fast, low-cost testing ground to see what’s worth investing in, and what isn’t!

So although opening up your IP may feel risky, with attention so fragmented and audiences moving faster than commissioning cycles, giving creators the keys to legacy IP might be the most efficient R&D model broadcasters have to make sure their libraries don’t fade into irrelevance.

Sonic the Hedgehog becomes Official Gaming Partner of McLaren Racing

McLaren Racing has announced a multi-year partnership with SEGA, making Sonic the Hedgehog the Official Gaming Partner of McLaren Racing. This isn’t the first time the two have partnered, with the 1993 European Grand Prix seeing Ayrton Senna awarded a Sonic the Hedgehog trophy on the podium. This further feeds into the “Racing Around the World” campaign from SEGA, coinciding with Sonic’s 35th Anniversary and McLaren Formula 1 Team’s 1,000th Grand Prix.

Why should you care?

TL;DR: Sonic takes over F1 as part of SEGA’s Racing Round the World campaign and a broader effort to build Sonic into a full transmedia franchise. For both SEGA and McLaren, there’s an incredible IP match-up which will give them both great storytelling opportunities and more touchpoints to engage with youth audiences.

In full: When the objective is to go fast, some partnerships just write themselves.

So 30+ years after last partnering, SEGA & McLaren Racing are back to accelerate Sonic’s growth.

We’ve spoken a lot about SEGA’s approach to growing the Sonic franchise in previous editions (Edition #62 & Edition #41 for those who want to dive deeper) - and this is yet another example of them matching their IP with other brands across culture to broaden their storytelling capabilities. Sonic’s been in movies, games, merch, and now, sports.

But it’s not just SEGA that wins in this partnership - McLaren now gets to extend even further into gaming culture to grow their audiences.

And with both trying to engage youth audiences - it makes a tonne of sense, especially given Civic Science found that 45% of Gen Z in the US now follow F1 to some extent.

But “to some extent” likely does not necessarily mean watching the traditional broadcast - it means engaging through Drive to Survive, through games, through socials etc, so pairing a character like Sonic (who many youth audiences know more from games and films) with one of the youngest driver lineups on the grid and one of the most digitally native teams in F1 is a smart fit.

And of course, this isn’t McLaren’s first rodeo in gaming:

• They launched their own esports programme (McLaren Shadow) in 2017

• They also built an experience in Roblox (McLaren F1 Team Experience) in 2022

• And as mentioned further down, a recent partnership with Logitech G.

So whether it’s Sonic, Roblox or sim racing, McLaren’s giving fans more ways in, and now both they & SEGA have a shot at enticing fans obsessed with speed, precision & style into each other’s worlds.

And although my dream of seeing a Tails inspired flying F1 car might be slightly far fetched - if we don’t see Sonic in a spin attack on the wheels, it’ll be the miss of the century. But knowing the teams, I’m sure they have some fun surprises up their sleeves for us all.

In other news this week…

• Ledger partners with the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs: read here.

• Cirque du Soleil partners with The Sandbox: read here.

• Logitech G become gaming peripherals partner of McLaren Racing: read here.

• Microsoft & Meta team up for Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition: read here.

• How New Balance went from dad shoe to NBA No.1 Draft Pick: read here.

• Valencia CF complete €322 million financing for new stadium: read here.

• Kraken secures MiCA license for Europe: read here.

• AI Platform Vermillio named in TIME100 most influential companies: 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 folks - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report and if you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a friend!