The must-know takeaways from SEG3 London 2026

Hey everyone, welcome to Edition 115 of The SEG3 Report.

In today’s instalment, we’re recapping last week’s SEG3 London. Over two packed days, we got the inside line from some of the biggest names in sports, entertainment & gaming on everything from franchise-building and the creator economy to AI in production studios, making IP playable and more.

Across those sessions, some clear through-lines emerged, so we've tried to distill them down into five ideas we think surfaced the most.

So let's get into it ⤵️

Key Insight:

Our two opening sessions tackled the big topic: fandom. It’s what underpins the industries SEG3 covers, yet there’s a lot of nuance in how each industry seeds, grows, manages and monetises their fans.

So we started at the beginning, with Calvin Innes looking at the psychology of fans, and why fandom is not consumer behaviour, but personality.

Some standout stats for you: nearly half of British adults consider fandom a core part of their identity, not something they buy into, but something they are. And 67% of gaming superfans say cost isn't a factor in their spending decisions.

So, when people have a preference, you can change your product, and people will adapt. But when you're dealing with identity and fandom, changing the core of your IP means taking something from the people who built their sense of self around it. A much harder thing to successfully do without breaking the connection!

This is because the fan experience works through reward pathways, anticipation, discussion, creative participation and social recognition. Fandoms are able to deepen because fans can contribute, whereas they burn out when they can only consume.

The next step of the day was to look at the data infrastructure that enables brands and IP owners to act on this understanding of fandoms, with Dentsu’s Yoshi Nakano walking through Fandom Intelligence, and the four questions that have historically been answered by instinct that can now be answered through data. These questions being:

What Yoshi presented is how that matching process actually works in practice. Cultural relevance, it turns out, isn't one thing, and actually falls into three dimensions:

So, depending on the makeup of your property, this will impact how well you’re able to commercialise.

Major sports properties like the NFL and MLB score strongly on Reach and Resonance, but anime outperforms them on Remarkable for example, having a powerful ability to drive cultural direction rather than just reflect it.

For brands trying to reach audiences who actively shape taste, acknowledging that distinction is the whole game. Focusing in one anime again, among US Gen Z specifically, it now sits alongside the NFL for overall cultural relevance, and is outperforming major live-action film categories entirely.

Key Takeaways

Why it matters: All of this information gives brands a structured way to navigate that landscape through IP mapping for longer-term brand building. The strategic question for every fandom-led business must shift from "how do we make great content?" to "how do we sustain multiple reward pathways for the people who care most?” in order to make sure your fandom doesn’t burn out, and find brand partnerships that keep fans engaged.

Key Insight:

Across the two days, a consistent theme emerged: most organisations conflate the surface of their IP (characters, formats, visual identity) with its DNA (the emotional truth that made people attach in the first place), and getting that distinction wrong is where franchise expansion goes bad.

The broader principle is that an effective IP growth begins with understanding what drives fans, not just how many of them there are. Because fans tackle misalignment immediately, and the backlash will travel further than the awareness.

Key Takeaways:

Why it matters: There’s a speed vs sustainability question at the heart of this - the warning being that a franchise risks losing its audience the moment its organisation starts optimising for growth instead of the audience that made the IP matter in the first place.

The resounding takeaway is that IP holders who understand the balance of growing their IP while retaining its heart will be the ones who are able to successfully turn standalone IP into long-lasting franchises.

Key Insight:

The trust infrastructure that prestige sports broadcasters once owned has fragmented and migrated toward personality, not performance, and rights holders are beginning to respond. Amar Singh presented MTKG’s World Cup Fan Pulse Report with the stats to back this up, which we went into a couple of weeks ago!

Some standout stats (again): 52% of fans who engage with creators now trust their match insights more than TV pundits. 73% plan to follow creators throughout the tournament, rising to 85% in the US.

It’s something we’ve seen a lot over the last 12-18 months (i.e. the FIFA–TikTok deal), and represents a meaningful move toward treating creator distribution as a genuine strategic channel rather than just a marketing add-on.

Getting into the funding, creators have become much more adept at finding ways to build direct-to-fan revenue models, with Arthur Guisasola joining the sessions to talk about all the ways, from tiered subscriptions, live events, advertising and more, that creators (and increasingly talent/ex-pros from across sports) are using tools and platforms like Substack to have that one-to-one relationship with their community.

However, the age-old question remains around neutrality, and maintaining the same positioning and objectivity when working with incumbents and brand partnerships.

Key Takeaways:

Why it matters: Rights holders and brands still running a single screen or single ambassador strategy across audiences using multiple channels at once are missing out on reach and loyalty.

Working with creators gives you a new distribution channel, but you're giving away content where broadcast partners are paying for it. There’s a risk that super-fan creators may not comply with agreed-upon media positioning, where more neutral creators may not have the right (or engaged enough) audience for your sport.

Working with creators is a balancing act between neutralising the very thing that makes creator trust worth having and making sure you stay true to your brand or IP’s DNA. Lionsgate are striking this balance with their new fan club, which engages creators to play with their IP within specific guidelines.

Key Insight:

The Making IP Playable session with Voldex and Formula E, combined with the Tottenham Hotspur Digital Strategy deep-dive, uncovered how many of the leading sports IP are thinking about building, engaging and servicing their fanbases long-term.

For Spurs, launching on Roblox wasn't an experiment; it was filling a deliberate gap in their digital ecosystem, and was designed to add a layer of fan participation which traditional broadcast and clips couldn’t offer. This interactive layer is helping to take the Spurs brand to fans who might not know anything about football, but now have a reason to engage with it beyond just the sport & game.

And a worthwhile call out here: their key objective was to build a good gaming experience, which meant design decisions mattered enormously to align with the platform-native behaviour that has its own cultural norms. Spurs understood that, and their goal was to give new fans something to play, to actively participate in, rather than something they recognised as they scrolled past.

Key Takeaways:

Why it matters: The organisations succeeding with making their IP playable are designing for participation from the start. This requires a different internal structure, measurement framework, and relationship with creative control, creating a genuine competitive window for early movers.

We’ve seen from our other takeaways that entertainment and gaming IP are strategising around how to manage their franchises and build a sustainable fan ecosystem. For sports and music, there’s a lack of deliberateness around this very thing. There’s something to be said for short-term monetisation, but if the Dentsu data demonstrates anything, it’s that long-term fandom is achievable if you give audiences the right pathways to engage.

Key Insights:

The closing sessions of SEG3 London provided a zoomed-out frame around AI application, with 24% of TMT enterprises having AI in full production, the highest of any industry.

Yet, the majority remain stuck in pilot purgatory (my new favourite phrase!), blocked not by lack of enthusiasm but by data siloes, legacy infrastructure, governance gaps and scalability, which has not kept up with the ambition of many when looking to use AI in their organisations. Paras Chugh from HFS Research shared the DREAM framework, which is designed to move organisations from isolated point solutions toward enterprise-wide implementation:

Three sessions that illustrated what closing that gap actually looks like in practice came from TelevisaUnivision's Bart Fussel, Hasbro's Gray Bright & London Marathon Events Bhavesh Vaghela.

Bart offered an inside view of a company with 500,000 hours of archive content, 13,000 employees, and an AI team bridging cutting-edge streaming infrastructure with traditional telenovela studios. For him, the best first AI project wasn't the most ambitious one - it was the unglamorous work like content tagging and library categorisation, which then made hundreds of thousands of hours of archive findable and usable. These less razzmatazz but essential innovations are now making everything else possible.

Speaking of essential innovations, London Marathon Events’ Bhavesh Vaghela referred to a “silent graveyard” of failed AI experiments. The secrecy around these failures can impact future developments, preventing folks from learning from what went wrong for other brands and verticals. Owning things that haven’t gone 100% to plan is a key part of the journey towards success.

And a crowd favourite AI story came from Hasbro, which introduced the concept of Behavioural Licensing: a framework governing not just where a character appears, but how it thinks, talks, and acts in real time.

The shift here being that whilst traditional licensing is a static permission, behavioural licensing is now a live operating system, built on CharacterOS, and anchored by what Hasbro calls the Golden Record: a character's core personality, canon, voice, and guardrails. (Pssst - we may or may not have an episode of The Speakeasy coming out with Gray shortly - follow along on your favourite platform if you aren’t already).

AI is now enabling IP that previously existed only in fixed media formats to be experienced interactively at scale while remaining fully governed, and it's a direct answer to one of the hardest questions in IP management (that we have been discussing for a long time):

How do you let fans get closer to your characters and talent without losing control of what those characters and talent represent? Interestingly, Hasbro's answer to this begins at the infrastructure layer rather than the experience layer.

Key Takeaways:

Why it matters: The AI conversation has a maturity split. While a small number of infrastructure-first companies are successfully pioneering entirely new monetisation models, the majority of the industry remains trapped in "pilot purgatory" because they lack the foundational data pipelines to scale. Ultimately, this third wave of disruption means value will inevitably migrate to whoever owns the data infrastructure and fan relationship.

So across two days, these are the tides we see shifting and the salient conversation starters that came out of SEG3 London 2026.

Fandom is identity; knowing the DNA of your IP is key to sustainable expansion; trust (but verify!) in the creator economy; playable IP should be baked into your strategy; and AI can create magic, but to do that, it needs to influence the infrastructure first.

The thread that runs through it all is how early, how sincerely, and how natively you design for the people who care most about your brand.

Thanks to everyone who joined us in London last week, and we’ll see you all for the next ones!

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