For CMOs, fandom is simply too powerful to ignore

Whether fan editors are getting jobs as full-time movie marketers at HBO or Spotify superfans are snagging specially saved concert tickets, the power of fandom is shaping how businesses across the board operate. So how are marketers taking fandom into strategic account?

At its core, fandom—whether of a character or a brand—provides a wealth of information on how passionate audiences consume, behave, and engage. According to Deloitte Digital’s Social Media and Fandom Insights report in 2025, 75% of Americans 18 and over count themselves part of a fandom. With that in mind, top executives at companies like Netflix, Tubi, Adobe, and Reddit are considering how fandom can shape brands’ connections to their audience—and what the opportunities can extend to marketing partners.

“At Netflix, if you love a show or a film, you are obsessed,” CMO Marian Lee said onstage at Netflix’s Fan Club experience at Cannes Lions. “We really wanted to take that theme of obsession, not in a stalker negative way, but in a positive way.”

Fans take the wheel

For streamers and entertainment companies, fandom has long been core to success. When fans collect around a show or movie, word of mouth travels, and new product opportunities can arise as titles rack up views and the company behind it all gathers cultural relevance. Perhaps no recent example demonstrates this enthusiasm and resulting business prowess as much as Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters.

At upfronts earlier this year, Netflix announced a live KPop Demon Hunters concert series, which Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising, said was developed as a direct result of the rabid fandom that erupted out of the film’s success after its premiere in June 2025.

Fandom continues to influence how marketing partnerships around the title come to life, too. For a collaboration with McDonald’s in March, which involved two dueling meal combos themed around the two K-pop groups central to the film’s plot, Lee said the marketing team looked to fan requests to determine what elements should take center stage.

“[We] took first what McDonald’s was trying to accomplish, and then what we felt was really endemic to the fans,” she said on stage at Cannes. “We do a ton of research. What do the fans of K-pop want right now? They want music, they want the singing voices, they want the rivalry, they want custom animation. If we can get all of that together, then it’s a perfect offering that we can have out there for the fans.”

Ad-supported streamer Tubi takes a similar fan-first approach in its marketing materials. Kudzi Chikumbu, VP of creator partnerships at Tubi, told us that niche fans make up Tubi’s core audience, and the team wants to “superserve them,” which can mean looking to what fans are already talking about to direct the company’s attention toward.

“Marketing to [Tubi fans] means one, understanding them, but two, amplifying,” he said. “People who love Tubi love Tubi, so you want to really amplify their voices and the things that they love, versus saying, like, ‘Tubi has all this horror, come and watch.’”

Previous fan efforts at Tubi have involved hyper-specific gifting to vocal Tubi superfans, like the custom Snuggie, wine glass, and projector that the company sent to Kesha Renea, a fan who calls herself “Tubi Bae” and posts about her favorite Tubi titles.

“We always want to make sure that if you’re talking about us, you hear from us, and you get something from us, and that we’re creating that flywheel,” Nicole Parlapiano, CMO of Tubi, previously told us.

Fandom for all

While many entertainment companies have fandoms built in, tech brands like Adobe are looking to fans as a force to tap into, too—albeit in a different way.

Adobe’s head of global social, Jared Carneson, told us that the perspectives of superfans of software products like video-editing tool Premiere Pro or image-editing software Photoshop can shape the brand’s social content strategy. He believes branded social content should serve one of five purposes: to entertain, inspire, educate, inform, or support its consumers—and in each case, existing fans can help the team identify which area to double-click into.

“For us, it gets so niche, because it’s like, this person is into nature photography, and there’s a whole community of nature photography, and this is how they’re using the tool set,” he said. “It’s about finding those niches and just giving them the conditions to do the things that they want to do and share their knowledge with other people.”

Regardless of the type of fandom, there’s one platform that marketers often identify as a central place to research and understand fans: Reddit. As CMO of the platform, Jim Squires is familiar with the fervor of fandom firsthand, pointing to the recent success of horror film Backrooms and its resulting Reddit chatter as a case study of old and new fans coming together on the platform to relish in a world they enjoy.

For marketers, that type of interaction itself can provide a trove of insights, he said.

“Anything that is on these fandoms, I think of Reddit as the greatest focus group that’s ever existed,” Squires told us at Cannes Lions. “We help [brands] on what they’re trying to do with our automated tools, pull all the subreddits that are relevant, pull all the conversations, and get their creative in front of people at the right moment in the right conversation in the right community to be able to fuel that fandom and to ultimately drive business impact.”