WTF are fandoms, and why are marketers chasing them?

Why it matters

Fandom starts where attention turns into identity, a formulation from Alice Woo at New Engen. The piece names two recurring mistakes: treating fandom as a substitute for media rather than a complement, and trying to operationalise it with metrics too crude to capture depth of identity. Sport, the most mature fandom market, is forecast to add 5.3 billion dollars in advertising spend between 2026 and 2030. The measurement warning is the useful part, since an existing community shows up in neither reach nor engagement rate.