Steven Bartlett and Authentic Brands Bet $400M on the Creator Economy
Steven Bartlett has spent the past decade building businesses around audiences, and his latest venture takes that idea a step further by putting capital and infrastructure behind other creators.
Bartlett and Authentic Brands Group have launched OBSN (Obsession), a new venture that plans to deploy up to $400 million into creator-led media companies, consumer products and brands over the coming years, with the aim of helping creators turn the audiences and intellectual property they have already built into larger businesses.
That ambition follows a career in which Bartlett has repeatedly moved beyond the format that first built his audience. He co-founded Social Chain in 2014, helping turn social media marketing into a global business, before launching The Diary Of A CEO in 2017 and growing it from a podcast into a wider media business spanning content, books and live experiences. He has since expanded his interests across investing, technology and media through FlightStory, giving him experience across several of the businesses that OBSN now wants to bring together for other creators.
The result is a venture built around a model Bartlett has already spent years developing himself. Steven.com will lead OBSN's media and audience-growth operations, while Authentic brings its global brand, licensing, product and distribution capabilities, giving creators access to infrastructure that would otherwise take years to build.
The Next Step For Creator Businesses
Creators have already become extremely effective at building audiences, but the next opportunity lies in what they can build around those audiences once they have them.
A creator might begin with a podcast, YouTube channel or social following, for example, and then develop that audience into books, products, live events, licensing or entirely new media properties. The challenge is that each of those businesses requires different expertise, relationships and infrastructure, which is where OBSN is positioning itself.
The venture plans to work across media, technology, audience growth, products, licensing, strategic partnerships and global distribution, so the relationship can extend well beyond helping a creator produce more content or secure another brand partnership.
Bartlett's own experience with The Diary Of A CEO provides a useful example of what that progression can look like. The podcast created the initial audience, but the business could then expand into other formats and experiences because the audience had become an asset in its own right.
OBSN is effectively taking that playbook and looking to apply it across a much broader group of creators.
Why Authentic Matters
That is where the partnership with Authentic becomes important, because turning an audience into a larger consumer or media business requires capabilities that most individual creators do not have in-house.
Authentic owns more than 50 brands and operates in more than 150 countries, with capabilities spanning licensing, products, digital commerce, content, experiences and strategic partnerships. Combined with Bartlett's experience in building creator-led media businesses, that gives OBSN a way to connect creators with the commercial infrastructure required to take an existing audience into new categories and markets.
For creators, the attraction is therefore the ability to build several parts of a business without having to assemble every relationship and capability themselves, while for Bartlett and Authentic the opportunity is to identify audiences that already have cultural value and then build businesses around them.
The $400m Bet
OBSN says it aims to deploy up to $400 million into creator businesses over the coming years, although the announcement does not specify how many companies will receive investment, how large individual deals could be or how quickly the full amount will be deployed.
That makes the $400 million figure less about a single funding event and more about the scale of the bet Bartlett and Authentic are making on creator-led businesses, particularly as the venture is also building a media and experiences business around the creator economy itself.
OBSN is already live and has more than one million Instagram followers, while its plans include new content formats, channels and live experiences such as festivals and awards. In that sense, Bartlett is building on the same progression that shaped The Diary Of A CEO: an audience creates the starting point, and media, products, experiences and partnerships can then be built around it.
The interesting part of OBSN is that Bartlett is now trying to make that progression repeatable. Rather than building one creator-owned media company at a time, he is putting capital and infrastructure behind the idea that creators can become the starting point for entirely new media businesses.
