Bartlett's $400M Bet & VidCon's Cannes Move

The Digital Dealflow

Author

Quartermast Advisors
September 17, 2026

Good Morning,

Steven Bartlett and Authentic Brands Group founder Jamie Salter launched OBSN, a venture that will deploy up to $400M into creator-led media companies and consumer brands, pairing Bartlett's Steven.com podcast and media operation with Authentic's licensing and distribution stack across Reebok, Sports Illustrated, and others. Authentic CEO Matthew Maddox told Bloomberg the same day that the company could go public as early as the first half of 2027, naming the creator economy as a primary growth engine for the next decade.

Meanwhile in London, Arcade, the management company behind the Sidemen, relaunched as a full entertainment company on a seven-figure investment from Lumina Media. Talent firm Night went the other direction and launched its own Roblox studio, KUZU, with UGC studio JOGO joining as investor and taking a board seat; KUZU is targeting 12-plus titles in 18 months.

VidCon is joining LIONS, the Informa-owned operator of Cannes Lions, relaunching as VidCon x Lions Creators with regional editions planned and a new US flagship, the Insight to Impact Festival, debuting in Denver next month before moving to Nashville in 2027.

On the tooling side, generative media platform fal acquired Lucent, the agentic creative platform built for advertising work, bringing both co-founders across, and Meta picked up Stockholm-based Stilla.ai to accelerate the AI agent now handling merchant conversations across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram for over a million businesses. Terms were undisclosed on both.

VidCon and Cannes Lions are now under one roof- the creator economy officially has a rosé budget.

Quartermast Creator Economy Index:

Layoff Watch:

  • McClatchy: Cut more than 90 journalists across at least 13 papers in eight states, with some newsrooms losing up to 40% of staff, months after a contested push into AI editorial tools.

  • IGN: Laid off 8 staff, roughly 12% of its union bargaining unit, under a Ziff Davis cost-cutting and return-to-office mandate despite consecutive quarters of revenue growth.

  • Oracle: Cut roughly 5,000 staff and committed another $700M to severance as it redirects spending toward roughly $50B in AI infrastructure, eight months after taking a 15% managing stake in TikTok's US joint venture.

The Weekly Roundup:

  1. UK Creator Spend Tops £1bn: New IAB UK research puts UK creator revenue at £1.217bn in 2026, up 26% and above a billion for the first time, with the figure excluding paid amplification that respondents estimate at two to three times creator partnership revenue (Marketing Week).

  2. YouTube Invents the Co-View: YouTube added "Views (Co-Viewed)" to Analytics, an estimate of how many people watched together on one TV screen, visible only to creators and positioned by the platform as a metric to use when negotiating brand deals (Tubefilter).

  3. Creators Make AI Shopping Credible: New IAB data found 56% of shoppers prefer AI shopping recommendations that incorporate creator perspectives, and 65% are more confident in AI recommendations informed by credible creator reviews (Scalable).

  4. IMDb Starts Crediting Creators: IMDb introduced a "Digital creator" credit with more than 40 subcategories including streamer, vlogger, and gaming creator (Tubefilter).

  5. Ghost Creators Go Mainstream: Brands are increasingly hiring pseudonymous creators purely to execute briefs, with one operator running 60 TikTok accounts and Virelox reportedly shipping 2,500 organic videos a week across more than 106 YouTube accounts (Digiday).

  6. Prime Video Goes Short-Form: Amazon is launching a short-form news feed on Prime Video, chasing the 20% of US adults who got their news from TikTok in 2025 (TechCrunch).

  7. The Creator Economy Splits in Two: Zach Blume argues that as marketers move budget into premium brand content with creators, the industry is bifurcating along the same lines traditional advertising did, into a premium tier and a volume tier (Ad Age).

  8. Creators Take the Emmys: Creators moved from red-carpet guests to official participants at the Primetime Emmys, with Trisha Paytas hosting NBC's TikTok pre-show, YouTube seating its For Your Consideration slate, and Kareem Rahma becoming the only creator nominated (Publish Press).

Upcoming Events

De-Influence

Looking for M&A guidance?

At Quartermast, we help founders navigate every step of the M&A process and maximize their exit outcomes.