From Comic-Con to CPMs: How Fandom Turned Pop Culture into the Ultimate Marketing Engine

Most brands trying to “connect with Gen Z” are basically fumbling around in the dark with a 1998 marketing playbook. They’re chasing trends after they’ve cooled, leaning on outdated audience buckets, and confusing “moviegoers” or “gamers” with actual insight.

This episode blows that approach to pieces.

I sit down with Jeremy Steinberg, CRO of Fandom, to talk about how the world’s largest fan platform—350 million monthly users across 300,000+ communities and 60 million pages—has become the gold standard for cultural targeting. Forget generic categories—Fandom’s FanDNA Helix uses AI and probabilistic modeling to uncover the why behind fandoms, predicting cultural overlaps and next-big-thing trends before anyone else sees them.

You’ll hear:

Why lazy audience targeting is the “Blockbuster Video” of marketing strategies

How Helix spots wild but valuable overlaps (think Fantastic Four fans also obsessed with Lilo & Stitch and Baldur’s Gate)

Why AI will blow up the “open web” as we know it and trigger the coming “algorithm wars”

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors

This episode is made possible by the folks who keep the lights on and the caffeine flowing:

Troutman Amin, LLP – The legal lions of adtech. If there’s a fine print, they’ve read it, rewritten it, and made it purr.

Incremental – The masters of measurement who make sure your marketing dollars aren’t out there wandering the internet without adult supervision.

Without them, this show would just be me shouting into the void about CPMs.

The real reason gaming remains wildly under-monetized—and how to win there without getting roasted by the community

How to activate inside fan culture so it feels authentic, not like you barged in with a press release

We also dig into the massive Gen Z reach Fandom commands, the “halo effect” of showing up where passions run hottest, and the future of brand positioning inside closed AI ecosystems.

If you care about marketing in 2025—whether you’re in adtech, brand strategy, gaming, or just want to stop wasting media dollars on people who don’t care—this is a conversation you can’t miss.

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