assion, fandoms drive culture and commerce, but are largely underutilised by brands. There’s a formula that marketers have leaned on for decades: find the audience, buy the attention, shift the product. What we’re less good at is finding audiences before they become obvious. Communities already mobilised around something they love, spending freely, and waiting for brands to show up in a way that feels made for them. This is not a small opportunity. A 2025 Snack Drawer report found that 57 per cent of Australians identify as fans and 32 per cent say their fandom forms a significant part of their identity, influencing their style, conversations and daily decisions. Among Gen Z, that rises to 75 per cent. Crucially, one in five Australians spend more than $500 a year on fan-related purchases. Here’s the stat that should stop any brand strategist mid-scroll: 66 per cent of Australians believe brands should participate in fandoms, but only if they add real value. Twenty per cent have actively stopped supporting a brand they felt was exploiting their community for profit. The gaming fandom opportunity Take gaming. 14.5 million Australian adults play games every month; that’s 64 per cent of all Australian adults aged 16 and over. Ninety-one per cent of Australian households own a video game device, and the average Australian gamer is 34 years old, not the teenage stereotype most media plans still assume. This audience is enormous, engaged and spending, yet many non-gaming brands still treat it as someone else’s territory. Non-endemic brands – those with no direct link to gaming – now represent the majority of esports sponsorship revenue globally. McDonald’s brought Pokémon TCG to Happy Meals. Lacoste partnered with Minecraft. Elf Cosmetics built its own world in Roblox. These brands identified where a passionate, high-spending audience already lived and showed up authentically within it. The brands that haven’t made this move yet aren’t absent from gaming because the opportunity isn’t there. They’re absent because they haven’t looked. BookTok brings all the fans to the yard The same dynamic is playing out in the literary world, with numbers just as hard to ignore. The Australian book market grew 3.2 per cent in value in 2025, and the growth is being driven by social media, specifically BookTok, a popular community on TikTok where people post about, review and recommend books. Adult fiction – the category most directly powered by BookTok – surged 19.4 per cent in 2023, while sci-fi, fantasy and romantasy – the heartland of BookTok – saw an 85 per cent spike in Australian sales. This fandom doesn’t stay contained to books. Skyscanner named “Bookbound” – trips inspired by literature – one of the defining travel trends of 2026, with searches using Skyscanner’s library hotel filter up 70 per cent year-on-year. The story spills into fashion, beauty, food and film. Every category a brand would want to be in. Brands capitalising on the opportunity American fashion house Coach saw this and moved. In late 2025, the brand partnered with Sunnie Reads, the Gen Z book club from Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine, and created The Book Nook, an immersive experience featuring book swaps, reading spaces and custom leather bookmarks. The brand followed this with a book charm collection developed with Penguin Random House, fronted by actors Elle Fanning and Storm Reid, and athlete Paige Bueckers. Attendees and creators generated organic content that amplified the campaign far beyond paid reach. A luxury brand, earning cultural credibility within a community rather than purchasing it. The brands missing out Meanwhile, beauty brands have largely left book creators out of their influencer programmes. The organic content already exists: character makeup tutorials, book cover-inspired looks, dark academia aesthetics racking up millions of views. The community made it without being asked. The sponsored version remains unrealised. Brands look at fandom communities and see niche. What they’re actually looking at is depth. A mainstream audience of passive scrollers and a fandom of 10 million deeply invested people are not the same media buy. The fandom audience already trusts, already spends, already creates content and is actively looking for brands that get them. Still, the hesitation is fair. Fandom communities have fierce authenticity standards, and as the Snack Drawer data shows, Australians will walk away from a brand they feel is exploiting them. But the answer to a sophisticated audience is a sophisticated approach. The brands that get it right show up with a genuine understanding of the culture and let the community take it from there. Fandom moments form on TikTok, Twitch, Discord and Reddit well before they reach the mainstream. Brands need to build the connection where an audience’s culture is forming, as opposed to where it has already peaked. Every brand has a fandom somewhere. The question is whether brands will show up before someone else does. Yasemin Akpinar is a senior account manager at media agency Hatched.