The Study That Should End an Entire Category of Marketing Meetings
A new study just dropped that should fundamentally change how brand marketers think about streaming partnerships, platform deals, and where entertainment marketing dollars actually go to work. Dentsu and IGN Entertainment, in partnership with Kantar and UC Berkeley, surveyed 6,250 highly engaged entertainment consumers across the US, UK, and Australia for their Generations In Play: 2026 Audience Insights Report.
The respondents qualified through meaningful weekly engagement including ten-plus hours of gaming, streaming, YouTube, or social platform use, meaning this is not a casual audience sample. These are the most active entertainment consumers in the market. And what they told researchers should end an entire category of marketing meetings. In this article, Hollywood Branded discusses what the Generations In Play: 2026 Audience Insights Report actually means for brand marketers, why IP longevity has replaced platform loyalty as the only metric that matters long-term, and what to do differently starting now.
Brands Bet on the Platform. Gen Z Bet on the Story.
59% of Gen Z users actively subscribe and unsubscribe to streaming platforms to chase a single title, with the report stating plainly that platform loyalty is effectively dead. 62% of Gen Z users say they will not pay full price for video games, 71% have stopped buying physical music entirely, and 70% no longer buy hard copies of television shows and movies. Every data point from the study says the same thing: the delivery mechanism means nothing to this audience. What they will chase and come back for is the IP itself.
This is not a new dynamic, it is the same one that made Ray-Ban iconic again through Top Gun, made Reese's Pieces a permanent fixture through E.T., and made Wilson Sporting Goods unforgettable through Cast Away. None of those brands built their strategy around which theater chain carried the film or which platform held the streaming rights. They built it around a story that people would not stop talking about, and the brand lived inside that story in perpetuity.
The platform was never the asset. The IP is. Gen Z just made it impossible to keep pretending otherwise, which is exactly why product placement and branded IP collaborations are about to matter more than they have at any previous point in the history of entertainment marketing. IGN Entertainment's senior vice president of marketing and head of Imagine AI Karl Stewart described the research as a behavioral map rather than a trend report, noting that what the data confirms is that each generation is running on a fundamentally different operating system and that the brands with a clearer view of how to reach each one on its own terms are the ones positioned to win in this environment.
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The Only Metric That Actually Matters Long-Term Is IP Longevity
When evaluating where to place a brand next, the first question is never which platform. It is whether the IP has enough gravity to still be pulling audiences back in five years. Streaming loyalty among the most engaged entertainment consumers centers on IP with real staying power: Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead. Properties that pull audiences through sequels, spin-offs, and format jumps, and bring the audience with them every time. These are not shows people watched once. They are cultural ecosystems that keep generating new entry points and new reasons to return, and any brand embedded in them keeps generating impressions every time a new viewer discovers the property or an existing fan returns for a rewatch.
This is the most consistent mismatch visible when brand teams walk into partnership conversations. Budget has already been committed to a show that tested well in development and nobody asked whether it has legs past season one. One placement inside a decade-long franchise is worth ten placements in shows canceled before the finale, and the math on that is not close. A placement living inside IP that stays in rotation for fifteen years, gets rediscovered by the algorithm, and resurfaces during a cultural moment is a fundamentally different commercial asset than a placement in content that drops and vanishes.
The brand's integration lives or dies on whether audiences return to the story, not on whether the platform promoted the title during the launch window. That reframe, from platform deal to IP longevity evaluation, is the single most commercially impactful change most brand marketing teams could make in their entertainment partnership strategy right now, and the 2026 Dentsu IGN data makes the case for it with numbers that are difficult to argue against.
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Gen Z Shows Up First and Nobody Has Built for That Yet
Here is the data point from the Generations In Play report that surprises most people when they first encounter it. Gen Z is the most theatrical generation, with 13% more likely to attend opening weekend than older audiences. Not just more likely to go. More likely to go first. The study is direct about why: Gen Z treats theatrical attendance as a social and communal experience. The theater is the destination. The film is the anchor. They are thinking about the theater as part of a longer overall day or evening experience, not simply a one-and-done content delivery event, and they want to be part of the cultural conversation that happens in the first 72 hours after a major release before the discourse moves on.
When Expensify and PEAK partnered on the F1 film through Apple TV, the sign-up spike after Damson Idris showed up at the Met Gala in the APXGP fire suit did not happen by accident. The integration lived in the film. The activation lived in the cultural moment around it. That is measurable business impact, not impressions on a media plan. Gen Z showing up opening weekend ahead of every other generation tells every brand with a stake in theatrical that the audience is there, primed, and ready to be reached. The real question is whether the brand is activated across the entire theatrical environment or simply sitting quietly in the content hoping to get noticed. For most brands in most theatrical partnerships right now, the honest answer is neither, and the Generations In Play data makes that gap more commercially consequential than it has ever been before.
The Theater Is a Full Media Channel and Almost Nobody Uses All of It
The theater is not a content pipe. It is a physical environment a brand can own from the door to the credits, and almost no mainstream marketer treats it that way. On-screen advertising through National CineMedia and Screenvision reaches roughly 4,000 locations and tens of thousands of screens, delivering a captive audience with no scroll and no skip button, and CPMs more efficient than most brands expect. It almost never comes up in planning conversations, and that is not an oversight. That is an opening that brands willing to take the theatrical channel seriously can walk through before their competitors figure out what they are missing.
Concession sponsorships and co-branded packaging put a brand in front of people who arrived early and are already spending before the trailers start. A branded cup or collectible bucket is a purchase-moment experience, not a media buy.
The Dune popcorn bucket generated its own news cycle: people lined up specifically for the object and posted it like premium merch, extending the film's cultural footprint in a way that no conventional advertising placement could have replicated at any comparable budget level. Lobby activations around major openings, sponsored fan screenings for specific communities, and loyalty program tie-ins with AMC Stubs, Regal Crown Club, and Cinemark Movie Club, whose combined tens of millions of members already show up, spend, and come back, are almost entirely untapped by mainstream brand marketers. The tentpole theatrical calendar makes all of it plannable months in advance. The audience that the Generations In Play data confirms is showing up first and treating the experience as a cultural event is already there. The only thing missing is a brand willing to walk through the door of the full theatrical channel instead of guarding the old single-screen-buy playbook.
Photo Credit: Hollywood Reporter/AMC Theaters
What to Do Differently Starting Now
Platform loyalty is dead. The Dentsu IGN data confirmed what the audience had already decided, and the brands still building strategies around platform relationships and distribution windows are optimizing for something that stopped being valuable before the study was even commissioned. Cultural loyalty is not dead. It is stronger than it has ever been. The 59 percent who cancel and resubscribe to chase a single title will do it again for the next installment of an IP they love, and they will do it for the one after that, across every format and every platform the IP eventually touches. The job for brand marketers is to already be inside that story before those audiences show up, embedded in properties with enough gravity to keep pulling people back, rather than making a single-window bet on a platform deal that expires when the subscription does.
Eager To Learn More?
If this piece got you thinking about how to build brand strategies around IP longevity, Gen Z audience behavior, and the full theatrical channel opportunity, these related Hollywood Branded resources go deeper on the strategies covered here:
- The Silent Majority: Why Brands Are Optimizing for the Wrong Audience
- Why Advertising Is the Value Exchange Most Brands Are Underusing
- Why Brand Partners Should Be at the Table Read, Not Just the Premiere
- The Viewership Number Problem Every Brand Marketer Needs to Understand
- How Pop Culture Partnerships Can Future-Proof a Brand in 2025
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