Hey all. Welcome to Edition #82 of The SEG3 Report!

Before we dive in, for those of you Stateside (or wanting to be), we just added Roblox, Bandai Namco, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Supercell & more to the lineup for SEG3 LA on Dec 9 & 10.

With just under 50 days to go, close out 2025 alongside the leading marketing & tech innovators from media, entertainment, gaming & sports ⤵️

For today’s spotlighted piece, we take a look at the role of clipping in achieving virality, Lionsgate’s use of that exact strategy and fan edits to promote their movies, and how MrBeast is aiming to productise it with the launch of Vyro; a platform dedicated to it.

Also covered: FIFA’s partnership with Football Manager + General Institution’s plans to use video game clips to train AI.

Let’s get into it:

Contents: Edition #82

• Lionsgate's clipping strategy for movie marketing on TikTok

• FIFA partner with Football Manager ahead of 2026 World Cup

• General Intuition raise $134m to train AI agents on video game clips

Lionsgate's clipping strategy for movie marketing on TikTok

Lionsgate has built a team of around 15 TikTok creators to create fan-edits, and is paying them to produce official promo edits for its titles such as The Summer I Turned Pretty and Barry Lyndon. These edits are native to TikTok’s style, and drawing millions of views.

TL;DR:

• Clips are now doing the heavy lifting of movie marketing by pulling in new fans, re-engaging old ones and building hype for new releases.

• Fan edits are also driving impact - with one Creed clip driving a 29% spike in Amazon Prime viewership.

• IP owners who loosen the reins and empower fan editors can increase distribution and relevance.

Clippers. Not the LA version, but instead, the unspoken engine (nay: army) behind many of your favourite creators.

These are the people cutting down your long-form content into bitesized chunks and formats optimised for social platforms.

And more so than ever, these clips are doing a lot of heavy lifting for IP owners to:

1. Introduce their franchise or brand to new audiences

2. Re-engage lapsed fans

3. Create conversation around upcoming releases / events

And if a 10 second edit on the right platform, with the right format and audience, has the ability to outperform multi-million dollar trailer drops, it’s worth exploring.

And so with that, Lionsgate have taken the initiative, and have built a roster of 15 fan editors, who have been given freedom to “create content that feels native” on TikTok, in a bid to create conversation (and engagement) around with their existing titles (think Hunger Games, Saw, John Wick etc), and to build momentum around their new releases coming to the big screen.

Why should you care?

As we covered in Edition #80, 42% of fans are creating content surrounding their fandoms (50% when talking Gen Z). That’s a lot of people building culture around your IP for free.

Bottling that passion that a fan has towards your IP or franchise, and now in the example of Lionsgate, incentivising and enabling them to continue creating content through a more formal relationship, gives you a low(er) lift, low(er) cost way of supercharging your marketing across socials.

This does however loosen control, which many rights holders hesitate at given guardrails have always been central to how franchises and brands have been managed, and loosening them can feel risky.

To that end, I resurface my thoughts from a couple of weeks back:

And that’s the shift we’re seeing. Studios like Lionsgate acknowledging the benefits of improved social content production and distribution, and instead of fighting with fan UGC, enabling it.

And Lionsgate aren’t alone. This week has also seen MrBeast launch Vyro, which essentially aims to productise the offering, and build a marketplace where editors are paid to create short-form content.

I’d argue both are a big signal of where we’re heading - where clipping isn’t a side activity, but instead, a core part of how brands & IP communicate their stories with new and lapsed fans alike.

So, what can you learn from this?

Whether you’re aiming to sustain your fan community, breathe new life into your library, or build momentum towards a new release / event, there are some questions you should be asking yourself:

1) Can it help me increase my distribution?

Leverage your fans as a distribution engine. Co-creation is not a passing fad, and with editing and creation of content becoming easier by the day, incentivising and supporting creators who want to create the culture around your brand for you is a win-win. It meets the demand for ‘always-on’ fandom while giving you reach you couldn’t achieve alone.

Strategy tip: Take a page from Lionsgate’s playbook and formalise a small roster of fan-editors. Give them access to your catalogue, light guidance on tone, and let them create content that feels native to the platform they’ve built communities on. It’s a low-lift way to scale distribution, but still give you high-impact visibility.

2) Can it be cheaper?

If your clips are being made by fans, then yes, it is often cheaper (and theoretically more effective) than relying solely on big-budget creative or endless ad spend.

Strategy tip: Consider using some of your budget to reward editors and amplify the best fan content. Think of it as stretching your assets further rather than having to produce everything in-house.

3) Can it help me breathe life back into my catalogue, or build interest in a new release?

Clips are brilliant at resurfacing old titles. I’ve personally gone down rabbits holes of watching 4-5 clips in a row of a movie on TikTok, and then sought out the full movie to fill in the gaps of the story. And it’s behaviour that Lionsgate are finding too, with Felipe Mendez, Manager at UTA, saying:

Strategy tip: Open up your catalogue, soundtracks or unseen BTS footage you have to your fan editors. They know what content will attract fans and drive conversation on the post. Add those two things together, and there’s a good chance the algorithm will pick it up and begin promoting it to others outside of the traditional fanbase.

4) Is my franchise or brand one that we’re comfortable for fans to take and run with (with a little guidance)?

This is the crux of it all, and can of course be the dealbreaker. If you’re not ready to let go of the reins, I would contest that it is going to be exceedingly hard to compete with other brands & IP that do lean in.

Strategy tip: Put some guardrails in place, and then let fans do their thing. Review afterwards and see what’s resonating. You’re likely to find platform native fans will know better than you the culture - and what’s funny, what’s likely to be shared and what’s got a good chance of driving conversation.

Closing Thoughts

If you answered “yes” to most of the above, clipping should be on your radar as a way to supercharge your marketing through fans.

As Lionsgate have shown, the trick isn’t getting people to create - they already are. It’s whether you’ll give them the access and freedom to make your brand part of their daily content (and onto everyone else’s feeds).

And that’s important - because without visibility, fandom’s can’t grow.

FIFA partner with Football Manager ahead of 2026 World Cup

Football Manager developer Sports Interactive and FIFA have signed a multi-year agreement that will bring officially licensed FIFA tournaments (including the FIFA World Cup, Women’s World Cup and Club World Cup) into the game. The partnership includes official kits, tournament branding and enhanced international management modules.

TL;DR:

• FIFA’s license lets Football Manager refresh its International Management mode ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

• For FIFA, it’s another step in their product strategy, and delivering games that meet fans everywhere.

FIFA comes to Football Manager - with their official competitions now appearing in the most in-depth football sim on the planet.

If you know Football Manager, you’ll know it’s not necessarily for the casual crowd. It’s for the fan who wants to live out their fantasy of being a sporting director - and is in fact that detailed that some sporting directors use it for their own scouting (but that’s for another conversation).

In other words, the game is detail-heavy, but extremely fun and has built one of the most loyal fanbases in gaming over the last 20+ years.

And so with the 2026 World Cup on the horizon, and FM26 being released in early November, the timing of the partnership is ideal, and importantly, allows Sports Interactive to reinvigorate one of FM’s most under-utilised features in International Management (which will now be around the 2026 World Cup).

As Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive, put it:

So, why does it matter?

Well, two big reasons:

1. International Management gets a refresh
With the World Cup around the corner, pushing international tournaments back into the spotlight, it’s the perfect timing to refresh a game mode, and broaden the games appeal leading up to the tournament.

2. It’s another touchpoint
Since moving away from EA, FIFA’s gaming strategy has been focused on testing new platforms and formats to get their IP and the sport in front of as many eyeballs as possible, with major partnerships with:

• FIFA World - Roblox (UGC gaming)

• FIFA Rivals - Mythical Games (web3 and mobile gaming)

• eFootball - Konami & Rocket League - Psyonix (competitive/esports titles)

• Football Manager 26 - Sports Interactive (hardcore simulation)

Each one targeting a different slice of the audience (i.e. super casual players with Roblox, all the way to hardcore players with FM26).

So, why should you care?

FIFA’s mandate is to grow football globally, and by having a product strategy that spans different platforms, formats and audiences, they’re making sure that football (or soccer!), and their tournaments, can be accessed, enjoyed and engaged with by anyone, anywhere. And that’s important as a global governing body.

Closing Thoughts

Whilst more details are still to be released, it’s clearly good timing for both to collaborate. For FIFA, it integrates their competitions into one of football’s most hardcore fanbases (and loved games). And for Football Manager, having the official license brings a kudos, and allows them to breathe new life into International Management.

A smart fit all round.

General Intuition raise $134m to train AI agents on video game clips

General Intuition has secured $134 million seed funding to develop AI agents capable of spatial-temporal reasoning, trained on vast data sets of video game clips (collected from clipping company, Medal). The company is focusing on building simulated worlds for agent navigation and reasoning, rather than competing directly with game developers’ content models.

TL;DR:

• Clips from Medal gives General Intuition access to a treasure trove of training data from players clips

• It open up new commercial opportunities like smarter NPCs, more engaging multiplayer bots etc

• If UGC becomes training data, will consumers care? Will IP owners start to get react as it falls outside of fair-use?

Another clipping story? Correct, but this time, with a twist.

General Intuition has raised a staggering $134M in seed funding to teach AI agents spatial reasoning using video game clips.

Wondering what the hell that means?

Whilst it sounds extremely niche and complicated, it just means the know-how / logic you need to understand how objects move and interact in space. So if you wanted to be able to fly a drone through a building, avoiding obstacles, spatial reasoning is what you need.

General Intuition are well placed to be able to do this as they’ve spun out from Medal; the platform best known for letting gamers clip and share their best (or worst) in-game moments. With over 10 million monthly users uploading around 2 billion clips a year across tens of thousands of games (most valuably, all of which is tagged with action labels i.e. what the player did, how the game responded), that data and content will now form the backbone of General Intuition’s AI research.

Why should you care?

Well, gaming seems to again be providing a training ground for AI.

DeepMind used StarCraft II and OpenAI used Minecraft to build agents that learnt by trial and error. General Intuition is following the same logic, but with the big advantage of having it’s own access to Medal’s massive, highly labelled library of real-player behaviour.

That means they can train the AI on human play (which means their brilliance, or in my case, mistakes), which could open up new commercial opportunities like building smarter NPCs, more engaging multiplayer bots etc - all of which could make games more fun and sticky.

That being said…

As UGC shifts from being just content to now becoming valuable training data, it does become a slightly different conversation - one that likely needs to redefine how UGC, AI training and IP rights will co-exist over the next few years.

From a consumer perspective, will they care that their clips are training AI? Or if the product or services are valuable enough (as Medal has proved to be), will they be willing to accept that trade-off?

From an IP owner perspective, if UGC of your game or content is being used to now train AI, is that still fair-use?

It’s a bit of a minefield - especially given many AI incumbents are leaning towards opt-out policies rather than opt-in, which doesn’t necessarily give IP owners (or fans) a choice in the matter (although, it’s worth seeing OpenAI’s backtrack on Martin Luther King’s likeness on Sora).

Closing Thoughts

It’s going to be a crazy few years as AI incumbents need more and more data to train models on, but given Medal’s constant stream of clips (with built-in action labels), it puts General Intuition in a really strong position to be able to build agents that can actually learn to move and adapt like humans - which, depending on your disposition, is either exciting or a little ominous.

In other news this week:

• NASCAR launches NASCAR25 with iRacing: read here.

• OpenAI pauses generations of Martin Luther King’s likeness on Sora after request from estate owners: read here.

• Premier League releases 24/25 Annual Report: read here.

• WSL Football announces technology partnership with Apple: read here.

• Winners Alliance & X partner for tennis and cricket stars: read here.

• Walmart partner with OpenAI for AI-first shopping experiences: read here.

• AFL teams up with Karta to launch Aussie Rules Obby on Roblox: read here.

• Banijay & YouTube double down on entertainment creator lab: read here.

• FC Barcelona extend partnership with Spotify to 2030: read here.

• Minecraft pack comes to Sonic Racing - Crossworlds: read here.

• Tottenham Hotspur experiment on Reddit with staff AMA: read here.

• o2 Telefónica & Crunchyroll announce partnership: read here.

• Fanatics, NBA & NBPA announce multi-year partnership: read here.

• Alpine F1 partners with Cato Networks: read here.

• Mattel launches Monster High experience on Roblox; Barbie & Hot Wheels to follow: read here.

• Griffin Gaming Partners acquires Playdigious for $12.2m: read here.

• Sequence to power The Sandbox’s SANDchain: read here.

• Fanattik signs merchandising deal for Sonic the Hedgehog: read here.

• VISA & EA Sports launch FC Mobile Festival in Bangkok: 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, and if you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend!