Why I Started The Disruptors – and Why This Week Felt Like the Right Moment to Launch It

ENGINE ROOM NEWS & INSIGHTS | DIGITAL GROWTH | JUNE 2026

By Engine Room

The Disruptors - By Athena Witter, Founder, Engine Pop™

This week, SXSW London returns to Shoreditch. It felt apt to finally launch this series on the same week as the festival that gave Engine Pop™ its public stage.

A year ago, at SXSW London 2025, I moderated a panel I’d conceived and curated called “Community and Influence: The Disruptors.” It brought together Jake Gosling (Ed Sheeran’s producer), Luke Hyams (The Sidemen Story, Netflix) and Nadu Placca Rodriguez (The Zoo XYZ) to explore how creators and cultural leaders are reshaping influence through community, not reach. It was the first time I’d publicly introduced Engine Pop™. But it wasn’t the first time I’d said it out loud.

The evening before I left BBC Studios, I’d been invited to speak at Provoke – an intimate, invite-only event hosted by Territory Studio, designed to challenge the way a room thinks. That night, I sat on a panel about brand fandom alongside Christopher Kenna, Katie Greenyer and others. I spoke about the communities I’d helped build around Doctor Who and Bluey. I was representing BBC Studios for the last time.

And then I told the room I was leaving. That the next day, I would no longer be inside the machine. That I was launching Engine Pop™.

My last act inside the corporation was also my first act outside it.

What The Disruptors is and why it starts now

The Disruptors is Engine Room’s flagship editorial series. Strategic conversations with the people who are actually disrupting how IP is built in entertainment, media, and the creator economy – not commenting on it, not consulting on it, not theorising about it, but doing it.

The name is deliberate. A year ago, I stood on stage at SXSW London and called that panel “Community and Influence: The Disruptors.” The people on that stage – and the people I’ve spoken to since – are genuinely disrupting the old models of how IP gets created, valued, and owned. This series gives their thinking the space it deserves.

Each piece features one person. One conversation. One lens on a question that the industry talks around but rarely confronts directly: where does IP value actually start, who builds it, and who ends up owning it? Join us exclusively on Substack and LinkedIn Newsletter

The first season explores how a music producer builds commercial value long before a deal gets signed. How a curator’s taste can transform the identity of an entire label. How a community that most of the industry would overlook can generate more durable revenue than one with millions of followers. How the infrastructure that enables creators to build at scale is being designed from scratch by the people the old system left behind. And how the deal architecture around talent-led IP is being rewritten by agencies that realised the old model no longer works.

These are people building at the intersection of entertainment, media, and the creator economy. Each of them has a perspective on IP, ownership, community, and commercial value that deserves to be heard on its own terms.

The pattern I kept seeing

The same thing kept happening, wherever I went.

I’d be inside a franchise that millions of people loved, working with teams who were brilliant at making content and I’d watch the value get built by one group of people and captured by another. The producer who understood the audience. The developer who saw the format before anyone else did. The digital team who turned a TV show into a living, breathing community. They’d do the work. The deal structures would reward someone else.

At BBC Studios, I was VP of Digital Content and Programming, working across the portfolio – from global franchises like Doctor Who and Bluey to everything in between. What I learned there was the difference between content and IP. Content is what you make. IP is what you own. Doctor Who has been generating value for sixty years because the IP architecture underneath it was designed to build. When that architecture is right, the franchise outlives every individual show, every cast change, every platform shift. When it’s not, the value leaks out through gaps in the deal structure that nobody thought to close.

At ITV, I was commissioning digital content, running digital teams and building second-screen experiences for X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, I’m A Celebrity, and Love Island. The I’m A Celebrity app became the most downloaded entertainment programme app in Europe and got a BAFTA nomination. The X Factor app won a Broadcast Digital Award for Platform Innovation. I gave expert evidence to Ofcom on how second screens were changing advertising. What I learned there was that audiences aren’t passive. They’re productive. The content that fans create around a show – the memes, the commentary, the communities – is itself an asset. But the industry had no way to price it. We were sitting on value we couldn’t see.

At Fremantle, I moved to the other side – running digital operations for the biggest unscripted formats in the UK. Britain’s Got Talent, X Factor, Too Hot To Handle. I saw the same shows I’d commissioned content for at ITV, but now from the production and operations side. That double perspective – having sat in the commissioner’s chair and the production chair on the same franchises – taught me something most people in this industry never get to see: how much value gets created in the space between those two chairs, and how little of it is deliberately designed. Format IP at industrial scale is extraordinary. But even at that scale, the architecture is often accidental rather than intentional.

At Channel 4’s Box Plus Network, I ran editorial and production across five divisions: production, TV, branded content, live TV, and digital. That was a music-first environment where the IP wasn’t a drama or a format – it was the relationship between artists, brands, audiences, and platforms. Running every dimension of a niche vertical taught me something the siloed organisations never see: how IP grows across touchpoints when you control the whole ecosystem. Music taught me that the best commercial IP is built from culture outward, not from a commissioning brief downward.

And across all of it, the same pattern. The producer who shaped the sound. The A&R who spotted the talent. The commissioner who understood the community. The platform builder who designed the infrastructure. The agent who structured the deal. These are the architects of the entertainment industry’s most valuable assets. And their contribution is typically invisible once the commercial machine takes over.

Why I left to build Engine Pop™

I left corporate life because I realised that the gap I kept seeing wasn’t going to close from the inside.

The entertainment industry is extraordinarily good at making content. It has become less good at asking whether what it’s making has any commercial life beyond the first window. The question that changes the shape of a business – the question that turns a production company into an IP company, a creator into a studio, a format into a franchise – is not “will this perform?” It’s “will this last?”

That’s a design question. And design questions need to be answered before the build begins – not after the show has aired, the deal has been signed, and the value has already been allocated.

Engine Pop™ exists to sit in that gap. We work with producers, founders and organisations building IP in a digital-first world. Ideally before the significant decisions have been made. Sometimes after. Always with the same question: is this built to last?

I use a framework called the Squeeze and the Orchard. Most media businesses are running a squeeze – extracting value from a moment, optimising for the feed, the algorithm, the current commission. One use. Then it’s gone. An orchard is different. You plant formats, characters, worlds, relationships – IP that grows across seasons, platforms, markets, and generations. The businesses that will be commercially durable in five years are the ones making orchard decisions now.

The question The Disruptors keeps asking

There is one question that runs through every conversation in this series, and it’s the question that Engine Pop™ was built to answer:

Are you squeezing, or are you planting?

Are you extracting value from a moment, or building something that will still be growing when the moment has passed? Are you chasing the algorithm, or designing IP that survives the next platform change? Are you making content, or are you building architecture?

The disruptors I’ve spoken to – the producers, the curators, the community builders, the infrastructure designers, the deal-makers – have all chosen planting. They’re playing a longer game, in a quieter way, with less visibility than the people chasing viral moments and quarterly metrics. And they’re the ones who will still be here in ten years, sitting on orchards that the rest of the industry wishes it had planted.

This series is for anyone who wants to understand how they did it – and how to do it themselves.

It started at Provoke – my last night inside the machine, my first night outside it. It went to the main stage at SXSW London. And now, a year later – on the week the festival returns – it becomes The Disruptors.

Welcome.

Athena Witter is the founder of Engine Pop™, a creative and commercial IP strategy studio working with producers, founders and organisations building IP in a digital-first world. She has held senior executive roles at BBC Studios (VP, Digital Content & Programming), Fremantle (Digital Director, Unscripted UK), Channel 4/Box Plus Network (Production Director), ITV, Sky, Endemol, and MTV/Viacom.

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