Hey folks - welcome to the 95th edition of The SEG3 Report!

Before we get into it - a heads up that SEG3 London is back for its fourth edition this 18 - 19 June.

If two-days exploring the convergence of fan-driven industries, and the tech, platforms and strategies helping brands innovate and shape culture sounds like your cup of tea, a limited number of First Release passes are now live until the end of February ⤵️

Here’s a quick look at what you can expect in London this June ⤵️

Right - onto this week’s edition - where we spotlight Puma’s AI creator platform, and how they’re working with Olympique de Marseille to enable fans to create and vote for the 2027-28 third kit.

Plus: The Premier League launches Dribble Dash experience on Roblox & Google’s unveiling of Genie world model.

Let’s dive in ⤵️

Ever hated your clubs kit designs, and thought you could do better - or just pining for the return of your favourites from yesteryear? (bruised banana, IYKYK).

Well, Puma and Marseille may well have the answer to those troubles.

The AI Creator kit design platform does what it says on the tin; lets fans design their own shirts using generative AI - empowering them to co-create with the brand, and in Puma’s words, “turn fans into active participants in the creative process”.

Co-creation has been a hot topic at our shows and in conversation with many of you for the past couple of years, and with tools for creation of content or games now being fairly ubiquitous, one of the big shifts we’re seeing is that creation itself is no longer the bottleneck.

The real challenge now is discovery, attention, and giving fan creations somewhere to live. So in that context, this activation becomes intriguing.

This isn’t Puma’s first rodeo with the AI Creator platform; it’s a model they rolled out with Manchester City in 2025, with this seasons (2026/27) third kit being a result of this initiative. See the shirt here.

That shirt was decided upon through a process that had:

That’s a fairly substantial number, especially considering fans only had 2 entry credits (unless they registered for the clubs Cityzens membership program, or had a Puma NFT).

Under the hood, the experience is being powered by DeepObjects - whose platform combines “text prompting, customisation tools and intuitive sliders” to give fans the tools to design kits until their hearts content.

Fans can approach creation in two ways:

1) Chat Mode - which offers a guided, step-by-step experience (designed for the fans that are new to prompting or don’t have a clear vision of what they want to create), or:

2) Prompt Mode - which is built for more seasoned users who want more granular control over style, colours and design direction.

In both cases, it’s an iterative process, and fans are given a batch of four AI-generated outputs to choose from. Each one is a slightly different interpretation of the same idea, and users then pick the direction they like most and continue refining it until they have a design they want to submit.

In this partnership with Marseille, fans can submit up to ten designs - but similarly to City, those with a hankering for more could unlock unlimited entries by signing up for an official Olympique de Marseille account.

I for one would love to know what the uptake of that was - and whether the value exchange was strong enough to be able to drive a % to sign up for accounts to continue creating.

In any case, the window to submit kits has now ended, and fans are currently up and downvoting the designs to come up with a top 10 shortlist. This will then go to a public vote, with the winner becoming the club’s official third kit for the 2027/28 season.

The journey of these activations map pretty neatly to the playbook we’ve been discussing of late; create → share → community → retention → revenue.

Fans are having a much more active role here vs just seeing the finished product - and it’s that participation that breeds deeper connection with the brand and passion point.

For Puma, it’s a new way for them to activate their partnerships, trial use of emerging tech for fan engagement (which they have been proponents of for quite some time), and build momentum, conversation and interest between yearly kit launches.

For both Marseille and Manchester City, it’s a smart way to involve supporters more deeply in the creative process without undermining their valuable manufacturer relationship with Puma.

Alongside that, during City’s campaign, they received 180k submissions.

That’s a really meaningful number of fans that participated, and that then had a vested interest in the final designs. If even a small % of that group then buy the third kit (which you’d assume sells the least vs the home and away shirts), it could help to push the needle commercially.

Co-creation, when working with established IP and brands, very rarely means ownership - and this is no exception.

While fans are invited to design and vote, the intellectual property ultimately sits with Puma. Submitted designs can be used, adapted, or commercialised by the brand, with no ongoing ownership or revenue share for the creator beyond the prizes on offer.

On one hand, it feels a pretty meagre trade off for the fan who designs the winning kit to hand over all rights to their designs to receive only x2 VIP tickets to a match and a signed jersey.

On the other, fans have been creating concept kits for fun for years - and this initiative gives them an official way to channel that creative energy, and scratch the itch, with direct impact on the designs their club will wear should their submission win. That counts for something.

Just yesterday we shared more from SEG3 LA on the topic of unlocking your fanbases creative potential energy ⤵️

Fandom is not passive - people want a way to participate, a way to share in their passions alongside a community, and a sense of belonging.

Puma - in giving fans a hand in the design of such a key asset like a kit, have put the groundwork in place for them, and their partners in Manchester City & Marseille, to discover exactly what the fans want.

And whilst I don’t think it solves everything (mainly the reward for fans), it’s a thoughtful attempt to use technology to meet fans where they already are, and give them more of a say in how their vision of fandom, and the club and city’s culture, shows up on an official club shirt - all while giving one fan the ultimate bragging rights to say to their friends and community, “I designed that”.

And who wouldn’t want that story in their back pocket for a BBQ?

Dribble Dash is an obstacle-course style game in which players dribble a football through a training ground, navigate challenges, and ultimately make their way to the stadium.

The Premier League is one of the most premium sports rights holders in the world, so it’s quite the indication that they’re focusing on UGC gaming.

With Dribble Dash, they’ve opted for an owned experience, which until fairly recently was the default starting point for sports IP on the platform. However, over the past 12–18 months, that thinking has shifted quite materially - largely because owned experiences come with some hard realities:

From a quick scout of Romonitor (as of 3rd February morning), the experience seems to be suffering from those realities, with it sitting at a 47% rating, 144k lifetime visits and 28 CCUs - which goes to show how excruciatingly competitive, unforgiving and fast-moving the Roblox ecosystem can be, no matter how premium your IP is.

That being said, there have been successes for sports IP on the platform, with the likes of:

None of these routes are inherently “right” or “wrong” - they just simply serve different objectives depending on where you are in your journey.

Ed Kiang, the NFL’s VP of Video Gaming, shared their journey from owned experience to full takeover of NFL Universe Football at SEG3 London last summer, and their rationale ⤵️

For the Premier League (similarly to the Bundesliga and their launch into Roblox, which we covered in Edition 43), their role goes beyond any one singular club. They’re responsible for creating the environment for elite competition, amplifying club and partner messaging_, and acting as global missionaries for English football.

Through that lens, I can see why an owned experience, where they have more creative control over the design and roadmap, and can leverage the experience for any tentpole event across the season, makes sense.

That being said, I would be surprised if there isn’t a plan to lean more heavily into integrations in the near future.

It’s a route that FIFA, NFL, NASCAR and many others have taken after firstly launching owned experiences, and it’s one that is likely to bear more fruit for the Premier League from a fan growth perspective.

All in all, getting something live at the Premier League’s scale is no small feat, and I’m sure the hoops that had to be jumped through to make it a reality were substantial - so congrats to the teams involved on the first steps.

And considering the league's track record with other parts of their gaming portfolio; namely Fantasy Premier League, you’d expect they’ll continue to test, learn and evolve their presence to succeed on Roblox too.

(P.S. I somewhat failed with the Speed Read for this one - apologies!!).

Google DeepMind has revealed Genie - a new AI “world model” capable of generating interactive, playable environments from prompts, images or video.

Your twitter feeds have been full of some funky creations too, right?!

But despite gaming companies stocks taking a dive after Google’s announcement, don’t count your chickens just yet that you’ll be able to build the next GTA or Fortnite using world models.

That’s because games rely on rules and things behaving in the same way every time for the game to function. World models don’t really do that, and are instead probabilistic (essentially improvising / reacting to what should come next on screen).

Whilst that is an incredible innovation, it means they’d be a pretty awkward (and unreliable) replacement for traditional game engines, especially for anything multiplayer or commercial at scale.

That being said, we could absolutely see world models being used across creative industries to test out new concepts, and figure out what’s worth building out further - but game engines like Unity will still be needed to transform the content generated into reliable experiences that can be monetised.

Longer term, there’s conversation / belief that these tools could enable entirely new kinds of interactive storytelling (check out a16z’s piece here for more) - but for now, world model’s most immediate impact looks set to be helping creatives in their ideation processes.

One to keep an eye on in any case…

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!