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As the WBD-Paramount merger finally closes, the market is betting heavily on a different asset than the one it just put 80 billion dollars of debt behind.
The deal just unlocked.
Yesterday (Sept. 21, 2026) Paramount settled the last antitrust suit blocking its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — a legal battle led by a dozen state attorneys general, California chief among them (Deadline). The deal, announced on Feb. 27, 2026 for $110 billion (SEC), can now close, with combined debt estimated at $80 billion (Deadline) and the largest entertainment IP portfolio ever placed under one roof: DC, Harry Potter, CBS, Nickelodeon, and more.
The dominant story is one of addition: more properties, more negotiating leverage, more opportunities for brands to rent a slice of pop culture that millions already love. It's the model we've known for 20 years. Put Spider-Man on a package. Launch a limited-edition Stranger Things run. Build an activation around Harry Potter. Get distribution, visibility and sales, all at once, faster and with less risk than building something of your own from scratch.
It's the calculation that turned licensing into a 389.8-billion-dollar market in 2025, growing 5.45%, faster than general retail (+4.52%) (Licensing International). Not every category is growing at the same pace, Sports +8.5%, Character/Entertainment +8%, Software/Video Games +12.5% (Dealroom; Licensing Source), but the overall picture is clear: sales aren't the problem.
The Measurement Gap
The numbers tell an interesting story. Sponsorship and partnership spend is climbing again probably in part because of the Nike trauma, which became the industry's cautionary tale of 2024: performance marketing alone kills brands. The lesson was absorbed fast, as a push to invest in brand building again. Maybe without the discipline needed to actually prove the return. Back in 2023 only 5% of brands were highly confident their sponsorship and partnership investments were effective (WFA/Lumency 2023). Two years later, the picture isn't negative at all, quite the opposite: optimism about future growth has more than doubled (the net balance between those expecting increases and those expecting cuts went from +5% to +24%), activation efficiency is improving ($0.81 → $0.76 for every dollar of rights fees), and the share who don't even know how much they spend on activation has dropped from 41% to 22% (WFA/Lumency 2025). But one number hasn't moved: measuring and proving ROI remains the number one challenge for 76% of brands — by a wide margin, the runner-up sits at 42% and 78% still invest less than 1% of budget in verifying it (19% zero, 59% under 1%). In other words: confidence in sponsorship is growing faster than the ability to prove it works (WFA/Lumency, full report).
These deals lean psychologically on risk reduction: I attach myself to an established brand and a community of superfans, and hand them the keys. You run with it. I walk away with a seasonal sales bump, some retargeting data, and a solid alibi if it flops: blame the IP. An airtight win-win mechanism. But what's missing is the after. what's left for the brand? What ownership?
Plenty of brands surely have their own ROI and incremental-sales data they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, but publicly, no comparable dataset exists.
There's also a deeper difference, one about the nature of the investment itself. A deal with a strong enough IP can explode, collectibility proves it, with a return that's probably excellent for whoever catches it. But it can also sink without warning: recent marketing history is full of collaborations that looked safe on paper and ended up as quiet flops, with no scandal and no boycott: Nike × Tiffany & Co. (2023), a $400 limited-edition Air Force 1 with a LeBron James campaign, judged by most to be little more than a regular Air Force 1 at four times the price (Discovery Design); or Lululemon × Disney (2024), a Mickey Mouse-themed collection analysts panned from the start as out of step with the brand's core audience, with unsold inventory still being flagged more than a year later (TipRanks). There's no model that predicts in advance which way it will go. Owned attention works differently: never guaranteed, but it responds to variables the brand controls consistency, quality, cadence not to the life cycle of an IP that belongs to someone else.
The Conventional Wisdom Worth Challenging
Meanwhile, the audience has already moved elsewhere. The Harry Potter community doesn't merge with DC's just because they now share a shareholder they remain separate fiefdoms, which is the very nature of what Alan Wolk outlines in his book, Welcome to the Age of Feudal Media. What's genuinely changed is who narrates those fiefdoms to younger audiences. Less and less the original product. More and more the creators: unfamiliar faces who open up the backstage, explain the details, work the niche with an expertise often deeper than whoever created the IP in the first place. U.S. creator advertising spend went from $29.5 to $37 billion in a year, projected to hit $44 billion in 2026, growth four times faster than the 5.7% of the overall media industry (IAB, 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report). Within that growth, micro and nano-creators are gaining ground faster than anyone else: they'll account for 45.5% of influencer marketing spend in 2026 (eMarketer). The market is betting hard on the smallest creators, closest to their own communities, not on the biggest faces.
There's an old piece of conventional wisdom worth challenging head-on: building your own narrative, your own audience, costs too much and doesn't scale, while renting a strong IP is fast and profitable. That was true when distribution itself was the bottleneck, you needed TV networks, newsstands, infrastructure only a few could afford. Today distribution is nearly free, algorithmic, open to anyone consistent and credible. The cost is no longer infrastructural. It's editorial: the ability to tell your own story, not just to buy access to someone else's. The real cost is identifying the right metrics, building real contact and membership rather than a purely transactional one. It's the difference between building a house and renting one for a vacation. It's not entirely black and white, though. Managing what you buy from feudal media has changed too, and it matters to understand what you're actually buying through what I call the "afterlife" test, which I go into in more detail on my newsletter, contentwithaview.com.
What Would I Do?
I wouldn't stop licensing or tapping into media distribution. The numbers say it works in the short term, and will keep working. But before signing the next deal with a media company, I'd ask myself a question the industry has no incentive to ask for you: what's left, the day after, once the IP stops lending me its community? And I'd build, in parallel, a piece of ground I don't have to give back, a format, a voice, an audience that returns because it recognizes me, not because a rented algorithm happens to surface me for a week. You don't need to build costly infrastructure or become the next Red Bull Media House. What it takes is consistency, measuring the right metrics, and establishing a direct relationship with your reference community. In dealing with big media as much as with creators, the point is learning to avoid the shortcut, and to build as much "afterlife" as possible, one more brick after the spike of any given special initiative.
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