Inside Fox's strategy to co-create IP

Hi everyone, welcome to Edition 116 where I’m exploring the strategy behind Fox Creator Studios and how they plan to work with creators to develop, distribute and monetise new IP.

Plus a couple of Speed Reads on:

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

For a long time, creator content deals have looked fairly straightforward across a variety of traditional media companies. The deal would involve a YouTuber or a TikToker (or influencers across other platforms) sharing clips, opinions, or even a sponsored segment about your IP/brand. Then, the campaign ends.

It was undoubtedly a transactional relationship, but it benefited both parties to some degree. Creators got the clout of being ‘officially’ on board with a major studio, and the studio got access to a broader, engaged audience they struggle to tap.

What FOX Creator Studios (FCS) is trying to do is codify a new way of actually working with creators, where, rather than treating creators as a distribution channel, FCS’ model treats them as founding partners. 

As FCS’ new lead, Billy Parks, shared in his newsletter, the deal structure is simple:

As he put it, this means they’re “aligned from day one on building something that has long-term value”.

That last point is crucial to actually leveraging a creator’s USP. Their audience lives on their platform of choice, so asking them to redirect that audience somewhere else creates friction. FCS’ strategy would see the content published to the creator's channels first, where that creator’s audience already lives.

It’s not too dissimilar a deal to what FIFA have recently done, which was two-pronged:

So whilst the content is different, the logic and strategy are the same. It meets fans where they already are and lets creators open that door.

For a long time, many traditional IP holders have been in defensive mode, treating the creator economy as a threat to monetisation rather than a new surface for building it. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with creator-content that infringed IP, some studios began bringing creators in and letting them play with their IP, within specific guidelines (we’ve covered this at length in previous editions, from Banijay Entertainment to the new Lionsgate Fan Club, and more).

What FCS is doing now is moving up a notch, shifting it from individual campaigns to long-term and intentional content. And they’ve picked a niche to start: food (a crowd favourite!).

From there, their strategy has been to drill down rather than out. Gordon Ramsay is, of course, the biggest name, but he’s surrounded by a curated group of YouTube food creators, each with their own specific audience. This gives FCS the category depth viewers are looking for, while also creating network effects, since multiple creators brought into the same vision can cross-promote and reinforce each other.

So my takeaway? Think in verticals, not one-offs. A single creator partnership is a campaign. A vertical of creators who all speak to the same passion point is a media brand, and the gap between the two will only widen.

FCS’ primary function, as I see it, is to find the seed of the next generation of IP, the kind that already has a fandom attached, a community that craves more, and a creator that people actively follow (here feels like an apt time to remind everyone about the success of Backrooms!).

If successful, the model will give creators the infrastructure and funding they need to accelerate audience growth, and they can then both be a part of the upside.

Creator-led content is popular (and monetisable) for several reasons, including the audience ones I outlined above. But also, it’s serialised, it's platform-native, and it lives where the audience already spends its time (on phones, mostly!).

What FCS is adding is the professional layer: production support, global distribution, and ad sales muscle that most individual creators can't build themselves.

Considering that 41% of creators say they want to build a sustainable, independent business or grow into a media brand or creator studio, that ambition is already there, and FCS has the opportunity to fill that gap of infrastructure and capital in a way that benefits both parties.

What jumped out at me most of all was that, according to Parks, FCS won’t give notes or approve edits, "unless you're into that kind of thing”.

As a journalist, I can tell you that a good editor is an amazing support to have. But a bad editor, or an editor you’re misaligned with, can ruin a working relationship and, ultimately, the content you’re creating. (And as someone who has also been an editor, I can appreciate the frustration on both sides of the relationship!)

This stood out to me because it flies in the face of what a lot of traditional studios and IP holders want: control.

When a legacy organisation brings in a creator, they’re excited by their audience and their energy, but sooner or later higher-ups begin asking to look at details, and eventually, this oversight can sand down what made the creator’s voice unique in the first place.

It isn’t malicious; it’s the instinct of an industry built around controlled IP expression. But the adage ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ holds in the creator economy, too.

But, and it’s a big but…

As content scales, organisational pressures don't disappear. If anything, they accumulate, so the real test of the model and approach will be whether FCS can hold that line as it grows from eight projects to eighty.

I think FCS is a natural progression from what we’ve seen for years and what Backrooms recently taught us, which is that the next wave of entertainment franchises will emerge from creators who already have audiences.

What I’m curious to see is whether other studios and brands follow the model’s most interesting points, or just keep its surface structure (which brings in creators, but keeps hold of the edit).

In any case, it’s an intriguing model they've built - community first, creator channels as the first window, equity over sponsorship, verticals over one-offs - and one worth studying for anyone managing creator partnerships or thinking about how the next generation of IP can get built and monetised.

The DFL has embedded interactive experiences across its entire Bundesliga fan journey, from the official app to third-party streaming platforms like DAZN.

TL;DR

Why you should care

This gets to the heart of the challenge many sports organisations face: how do you engage fans beyond the matchday, and what’s the journey you can take to begin to know more about who your fanbase is?

The instinct is often to look towards more of everything; more content, more events, more platforms etc - in the hope that the increase in touchpoints will lead to more of your audience becoming part of your own ecosystem vs a partners or a platforms.

But sometimes, in trying to take audiences away from where they are spending their time, all you succeed in doing is creating friction rather than a fandom.

What we like about this is that whilst the DFL are still creating opportunities for fans to have a direct relationship with the league (through the Man of the Match & Advent Calendar products), there is the understanding that partners, like DAZN in this example, also play a key role in how many of your fans consume your product, so enhancing that experience and allowing them to participate where they are is equally important.

Whilst this approach means you might not be able to glean the same level of insights that you could if the fan was engaging directly through your owned and operated, it does deliver a deeper level of engagement around your product (and your partners).

Your job after this point is to create a pathway (or in other words, a reason or proposition) for those fans to find their way into your own ecosystem off the back of the experience you helped create.

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!