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Netflix & Mastercard's Immersive Experience Partnership

& Lionel Messi's Animated Series and Fortnite skin + Pokemon and Aardman collaboration for stop-motion animation coming in 2027

Author

Joe Condon
December 17, 2024

Hey folks - welcome to Edition #40 of The SEG3 Report.

Two very quick things before we dive in:

  1. We had such an incredible time hosting SEG3 LA last week - thanks to all within our community that joined IRL and made it the experience it was. We’ve dropped some of the insights from the event into today’s edition, but keep an eye out on our Linkedin for the highlights & clips which’ll be dropping shortly.

  2. We’ll be taking a short break over the Christmas break, and will return with Edition #41 on January 7th.

Contents: Edition #40

Without further ado, let’s get into it…

Netflix & Mastercard's Immersive Experience Partnership

Netflix has partnered with Mastercard to offer cardholders exclusive perks and access to its immersive live experiences - with shows like Stranger Things, Bridgerton, Outer Banks and more all transcending the screen to become live entertainment experiences for their fans to engage with.

Why You Should Care

Netflix has approx. 247 million global subscribers, and Mastercard an estimated 2.9 billion cardholders globally - so the scale to this partnership is truly huge.

So what’s the partnerships aiming to do?

Both Mastercard & Netflix believe there is a generational shift taking place, where the audience would rather put their money towards spending on experiences than anything else - with a Mastercard study finding that “60% of people are actively saving to indulge in the experiences that fuel their passions.”

For those of you who joined us @ SEG3 London in June, this perhaps won’t be a revelation as we were lucky enough that Kerry Elsdon, Mastercard’s SVP Global Brand Strategy & Innovation, spoke to the brands partnership strategy and their focus on providing priceless experiences for their customers around their passion points (with some really interesting initiatives leveraging emerging tech like Artist Accelerator, The Gamer Academy, Pass to Priceless etc).

With sports, entertainment & games being able to evoke passion like no other, our industries sit high on the list of where people want to spend their time and money - so it’s important for brands like Mastercard that have built a narrative around experiences to have access for their customers to something like Netflix’s IRL experiences.

So what are these IRL experiences Netflix are committing to, and why?

Well, according to Co-CEO Ted Sarandos, the initial Netflix House locations are “meant to mostly be a learning experience”, but with the plan to have “50 or 60 of these around the world”, it’s a fairly large commitment to experiential.

Time will tell how the experiences will help to grow Netflix’s franchises and fanbase - but my feeling is the success will lie in the design.

Can they be designed to meet the needs of the superfans, who want to fully immerse themselves further into the franchise, whilst also being able to cater to the audience who are just intrigued by the entertainment factor of attending an immersive experience and successfully drive them to watching the show & film?

This would be the dream scenario, but history says finding the perfect balance between hardcore fans and casual consumers is incredibly hard to achieve given you’re managing very different expectations.

On the whole, this partnership feels like a great fit. It allows Mastercard to continue delivering value to their cardholders through access to unforgettable experiences from Netflix, whilst Netflix gets access to a sizeable audience that is already well versed in Mastercard being their conduit to get access to their favourite passion points.

In any case, it’s a really interesting approach to location based entertainment that could well help Netflix to replicate the connection they have on-screen with their audience off of it.

Lionel Messi's Animated Series with Sony Pictures & Music + Fortnite skin and emote drop

Disney Branded Television has acquired “Messi and the Giants,” a sci-fi animated show inspired by worldwide football sensation Lionel Messi from Sony Music Vision and Sony Pictures Television – Kids (SPT – Kids). The animated series, which unfolds in an epic saga where a young boy named Leo is transported from his home in Argentina into a fantastical alternate universe, will premiere on Disney Channel, followed by Disney Channel On Demand and globally on Disney+.

Alongside this, its also reported that Lionel Messi will be the latest sports star to become part of Fortnite - with the icon to drop a number of skins and emotes for players to purchase and use in-game.

Why you should care?

With this move, we have now seen some of football (soccers) most iconic stars turn to other media channels to help tell their stories.

  • Messi with his integration into Fortnite, and the upcoming launch of ‘Messi & the Giants’.

  • Ronaldo & Bellingham with their Youtube channel launch.

All of these moves signal that growing, or even maintenance, of their brand and audience is requiring more of a multi-channel, multi-format, creative approach than ever before.

This fragmentation of audience means that brands, IP owners and talent alike cannot prioritise just one channel anymore. They can certainly have a channel they’re experts in (creating content & monetising through), but to remain front of mind, they need to be telling their stories across multiple mediums at once.

As one of our speakers at SEG3 LA last week put it:

“Storytellers of the future will not have platform bias - they’ll look at it in the way of how can we tell stories to the maximum size audience in the most diverse way - but they’ll also face big challenges as they’ll have to speak to all these different ways of articulating their vision.”

So the challenge really lies in how you can build a narrative across multiple platforms that is aligned, storytelling/gameplay that fits your brand and allows your fans to connect/resonate with it without it feeling like a reach, as well as high quality content that meets the expectation of your audience.

All of this by no means simple, but those that commit and really start to nail their strategy, production & marketing will be the brands, IP & creators that remain relevant to the next-generation.

Looking back to the animated series Messi will be launching, he said:

“I always dreamed of being involved in a project that would share the values of sports, the very same values that have been so important to my career, with younger generations. Nothing truly is impossible with teamwork, perseverance, discipline, and hard work”.

Lionel Messi

As we just discussed, the success will lie in the narrative - does it fit his brand, how easy can the connection be made to his career without it becoming too narrow of a focus that it alienates a wider, non-football audience etc.

Hopefully it can avoid those pitfalls and become a great example of how sports brands/talent can leverage animated series to grow their audience/build lore.

And speaking of animated series…

Pokemon and Aardman collaboration for stop-motion animation coming in 2027

Aardman, renowned for its stop-motion creations like "Wallace & Gromit" and "Chicken Run," will bring its distinctive storytelling style to the Pokémon universe, introducing brand-new adventures.

Why you should care

Although there isn’t a great deal of meat on the bone with this announcement as of yet, Pokemon partnering with Aardman, creators of the timeless Wallace & Gromit, feels like a match made in heaven that needed highlighting.

Although Pokemon has 20+ years of animated series under its belt, as well as a relatively recent theatrical release with ‘Detective Pikachu’, a stop-motion animation series is something that is completely new for the franchise, and is an exciting development that will unlock a new style/format of content for fans of the the IP to get their teeth into.

My personal take on this is that stop-motion really does help to capture the ‘human’ element of the characters, and the pain-staking production (although becoming slightly quicker with integration of new technology) means there is an all-round appreciation from the audience for the creativity that has to be applied to make these shows/films a reality.

In a week where we discussed GenAI’s impact on creativity at SEG3 LA, and how you can utilise technology whilst still maintaining connection and feeling in what is produced, this way of working and the decision from Pokemon to partner with Aardman feels like the personification of that trend.

Rest assured we’ll be back to cover this once it launches in 2027, but for now, why not check out how stop-motion films/shows are made:

In other news this week…

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 - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report, have a great break and we’ll see you in the new year for more!