Audience IP is the new asset class. The industry is still pricing it like marketing.
- Engine Pop
- May 5
- 5 min read
ENGINE ROOM NEWS & INSIGHTS | DIGITAL GROWTH | APRIL 2026
By Engine Room - Athena Witter, Founder, Engine Pop
There is a sentence I've been using for a while in this work, and it bears writing down for the record.
This industry priced attention. It priced reach. It has not yet priced participation. And participation is where the value has moved. - Athena Witter
The reason that sentence matters is simple. The infrastructure of the entertainment business — rights, measurement, distribution, financing, the way studios and broadcasters and platforms negotiate against one another — was built for a model in which audiences watched. We are now operating in a model in which audiences also produce. The content audiences make around films and shows is itself an asset, with commercial weight, cultural reach, and discoverable economics. Most contracts don't account for it. Most platforms are not priced for it. Most companies can't measure it. The studios that have started to treat it like the asset it is are pulling ahead. Most haven't.
The frame I use for this — audience IP — is a deliberate choice. Fandom is a consumer word for a producer behaviour and consumer language gets you marketing budgets. Audience IP gets you commissioning budgets. The shift from one to the other is the strategic question of the next twelve months for any business that owns or licences entertainment content. - Athena Witter
Where the conversation actually happens
Map the conversation around any major film or show on social and the centre of gravity isn't the official channel. It's the audience itself. The supply of fan-made content around a strong piece of IP outpaces the supply of brand-made content by a wide margin, and the gap is widest exactly where character IP is strongest — animation, kids and family, fandom-driven sci-fi, sport.
The implication is not that studios should produce more of their own content. The implication is that audiences are doing the work the marketing team used to do and the platforms' algorithms are tuned around that fact. The audience is the production team now. The signal that matters is not how many people watch your trailer; it is the rate at which they remake your IP.
What Aardman is showing us
I moderated a session with Kenny England, who runs digital, social and communities at Aardman, and Amy Johal, who leads entertainment partnerships at TikTok, at Create London this April. The reason it is worth writing about — beyond the panel — is that Aardman is one of the few studios in the country actually treating audience IP like it matters at the financial level, not the marketing level.
Three things from the conversation are worth lifting out.
One — the campaign worked and the lessons are useful. Aardman ran a TikTok competition around its next Shaun the Sheep feature, where the prize was being sculpted in clay into the film itself. Trailer-week reach was strong, in the millions. Participation was lower than the team had hoped. Kenny's diagnosis was useful: the entry bar was set too high for a young, scroll-first audience and the brief was too broad. Lower the bar, narrow the frame, run it again. The interesting thing is not that participation undershot. The interesting thing is that the studio learnt the right lesson — and went on the record about it. That candour is rare in this industry, and it should be louder.
Two — Aardman's biggest fan base is Indonesia. Around a third of its audience. Shaun the Sheep is also a non-speaking character — which means the territorial complications most franchises hit on social barely apply to him. A non-speaking character is, in effect, a global asset by design. That has implications for how the industry briefs character IP from the start, and almost no one is currently thinking about it that way.
Three — Aardman is piloting in-house production at platform speed. Internally they call it Creator Sean. A small residency inside the studio rotates animators monthly to make original short-form claymation, designed for TikTok rather than packaged from broadcast. The animators have embraced it. The audience response has been disproportionate to the cost. It is the most interesting answer in British entertainment right now to the question how does a craft studio operate on a feed.
The catch is that craft is expensive. Bespoke animation runs five to seven figures per finished minute. The platform economy was designed around individual creators, with incentive structures and revenue mechanics built for that shape. A heritage studio that wants to make original work at platform speed has to fund the difference between those two models out of its own balance sheet — and the maths only works if the work is being treated as IP investment, not marketing spend. That is the funding question the industry has not solved, and it will not solve itself.
What the platform is asking us to remember
Amy's clearest line at the close was the one most studios still don't act on.
Audiences come to TikTok for entertainment. Not for corporate announcements.
If your social plan reads like a comms calendar, the platform's algorithms will treat it like one. If it reads like a writers' room, it will be treated like one. There is a category difference, and the difference is internal — what kind of team you give the work to, what brief they are operating against, what they are measured on.
What this industry should do on Monday morning
Three things from Engine Pop:
Treat audience IP as its own asset class. Build it into your rights deals, your measurement frameworks, your P&Ls. The companies that make this move first will be the ones writing the rules of how participation gets valued for the next decade.
Move the work into creative, not marketing. The people closest to your audience are in development, not in comms. The organisational shift here is internal before it is external.
Bet on craft. In an era of auto-generated everything, the most defensible commercial position is the thing that obviously took a human a long time to make. Aardman is the proof. In a feed of synthetic content, stop-motion is going up, not down.
This is not a trend piece. It is an asset-class question, and it is being decided in real time.
The companies that price participation as a marketing cost are going to keep losing the audiences they think they own. The ones that price it as IP — and structure their rights, their teams, and their financing accordingly — are going to spend the next decade looking like the smart ones.
That part is the project.
Athena Witter is founder of Engine Pop, a creative and commercial IP strategy studio working with producers, founders, platforms and studios on how IP is designed, scaled and commercialised in a digital-first world. She is a former VP Digital Programming at BBC Studios, with senior executive roles across Fremantle, ITV and Channel 4.
Contact Engine Pop hello@enginepop.co
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