Marketers Explain How Creators, TikTok, Spotify and Pinterest Keep Fans Coming Back

At Variety‘s Entertainment and Technology Summit in Los Angeles, six top marketers met to discuss a single change: letting the people who love your show help sell it. Publisher and co-president Dea Lawrence moderated the panel, which drew executives from Archrival, TikTok, Spotify, Pinterest, AMC Global Media and Lionsgate. Every speaker pushed the same point: trust the audience to do the heavy lifting.

Gated marketing materials and controlled platform launches no longer work. Studios and creators must now let audiences take their own stabs at beloved properties through social media and social video. Dawn Yang, global head of entertainment for TikTok, described this audience-driven co-creation as something uniquely hers. She backed up her point with figures: over 12 million TV and film posts are posted by users every day.

TikTok’s Daily Posts

The scope of the shift was laid out by Yang. She pointed out that fans are no longer simply watching content; they are now creating it on a huge scale. Her numbers demonstrate how deeply engaged audiences have become. Every day, 12 million posts about TV and film move through the platform, produced by people who care about the stories enough to remake them.

Global head of digital marketing for Lionsgate Briana McElroy gave a practical example to back up that point. The studio hires fans to create its TikTok content, which is known as edits on TikTok and has become wildly popular. The creators are mostly teenagers — 17, 18, 15 years old — who use the platform to show their love for a person, a movie or a musician.

Spotify’s Long-Form Findings

Jenny Haggard, who leads thought leadership globally at Spotify, questioned a widely held belief about younger listeners during the session. The panel took aim at the notion that teens and young adults cannot tolerate longer pieces of content. She pointed out that the industry has grown accustomed to producing ads that last just six seconds. Her own findings, however, suggested otherwise.

She went into Spotify’s dashboards and found that a third of older Gen Zs are streaming 100% of two-hour-long podcast episodes. That tells her that Gen Z is not allergic to long-form content; they are allergic to shitty content. James Cameron would be out of a job if people did not like long form content, she argued.

Pinterest’s Pop-Up Experiences

Pinterest’s global head of consumer marketing, Sara Pollack, discussed a recent collaboration with Warner Bros. tied to the theatrical release of “Practical Magic 2.”. Fans turned to the platform in search of ideas, wanting to show their fondness for the film.

Specific trends among Gen Zers were pointed out by Pollack, including a demand for content tied to herbal apothecaries, crystal meanings and tarot readings, all related to the film. That gave young people who had not yet seen the first film a chance to build a real-world pop-up experience. Tarot card readings, custom candle making and figuring out how to create their own brew of tea were among the offerings available to attendees.

She explained that the link between the film and Pinterest runs deeper than just a view, a post, or a thumbs-up.

Life Stage Over Birth Year

Spotify’s annual report looks at the demo defined as ages 14-29, and Haggard used it to argue that marketers misjudge audiences by treating Gen Z as a single group. Instead, she said life stage predicts behavior more reliably than birth year.

When she reflected on her own history, she found two distinct versions of herself. There was the teeny bopper dancing to NSYNC in her bedroom, and then there was 29, a young professional working and living in New York. That contrast shows why marketers should stop thinking of the whole group as a single, uniform set.

The Fan-Created Content Model

Ben Harms, who serves as chief growth officer at youth culture marketing agency Archrival, laid out a wider framework for triumph in the next decade. According to him, the companies that will succeed over the next 10 years are those that know how to genuinely deliver something of worth to customers. He cited Spotify as a standout case in point.

While we have so much data and we’ve optimized and engineered everything, there is this sense that we’ve sort of lost the magic of the world in a lot of ways, Harms said. Brands today are building ecosystems of experiences and human connection that go far beyond attention and just getting noise out there. The goal is building meaningful connections with consumers.

Kim Granito, who serves as the CMO of AMC Global Media, spoke about the demand placed on marketers to match fan creativity. She explained that it falls upon marketers to ensure there are pathways for people to discover and enjoy entertainment precisely where they prefer to engage with it.

What This Means for Marketing

Yang described the central insight of the panel as a change in who holds power. Brands used to set campaigns and platforms entirely on their own terms. Today, the audience has become the one doing the editing. This participatory culture of shared creation is what makes it distinct from anything before it, he said.

Haggard argues that the idea teens and young adults cannot sit through lengthy content is false. Instead, he says the numbers show older members of Generation Z listen to entire podcasts with almost perfect completion rates. The issue, in his view, is not how long they can pay attention; it is the quality of what they are listening to.

The panel suggests giving up attempts to copy fan creativity. Instead, let the fans do it themselves. This approach is authentic, and it is already succeeding.

The way entertainment sells itself has changed. Daily posts now number 12 million, podcast streams stand at 100%, and pop-up experiences come from fan searches. Marketers are not just talking about these changes; they are already putting them into practice.

Source material: “Top Marketers on How Creators, TikTok, Spotify and Pinterest Help Fuel Fandom,” Variety.

creators · marketing · Pinterest · Spotify · TikTok