Here’s an unexpected new trend: Male content creators chasing dreams of becoming UFC fighters.
Julie Bogaert, Snap Inc. Head of Creator Partnerships EMEA, revealed the trend during a session on developing community-led IP this morning at MIP London, as she called on creators to remain true to the content that built their audience.
She warned that inauthentically attempting to engineer a new direction could be disastrous if the audience rejected it. “The credibility piece is super important,” said Bogaert.
“These days I’m seeing a lot of male creators in certain markets who want to become UFC fighters. They started with very different types of content,” she added.
Bogaert recalled a “really difficult conversation” she recently had with a European content creator, who wants “to be a UFC guy,” but was failing because he was “not documenting the journey to get there properly.”
She added: “You can see he is trying to is trying to get on that boat because he is seeing other people succeeding. If your community trust you for a certain thing, they will continue follow you if they can see what you’re doing is authentic, but if they can see you’re just doing it because you think it’s the right thing to do, that’s where you can break the trust and it is very difficult to rebuild.”
Bogaert was contributing to a portion of the discussion on how creators could lose their audiences, during which Spotify‘s Saruul Krause-Jentsch, Head of Podcast for Central Western Europe, said: “If you risk credibility you have lost everything.”
Krause-Jentsch said the creator economy was based on organic audiences of fans who hunt specific topics or themes. “It is really about people making an act of choice to follow you and that is very fragile,” she added. “Credibility can be lost so easily.”
Elsewhere in the talk, the CEO of European creator studio We Are Era, Tobias Schwiek, challenged the audience to consider how it thinks of creators, noting they “depend” on the community they have built more than the audience depends on them.
“It’s the community economy, not the creator economy,” he said, adding that creators are “the northern star” around whatever niche they’re serving.
MIP London is in its second day today at the Savoy Hotel and the IET London. It runs until tomorrow (February 24), and is currently running in parallel to the London TV Screenings.