Steven Bartlett recorded the first episode of The Diary Of A CEO in a bedroom in Manchester, on a $100 microphone. The podcast is now the holding company Steven.com, which according to his own words serves more than 500 creators and employs almost 200 people.
On Monday, Bartlett stood in New York next to Jamie Salter, founder of Authentic Brands Group, and the two announced the joint venture OBSN.
Bartlett does not dress up the goal of OBSN. “We are aiming to deploy up to $400m in creator businesses over the coming years,” states the Authentic press release. In his announcement post, he speaks more cautiously of “hundreds of millions of dollars”.
So $400 million is the ceiling of an ambition spanning several years, a declared goal of gradual deployment. Even so, it is one of the largest declared budgets to have been announced on a single stage in the creator economy.
What each side brings
OBSN, read as Obsession, combines two very different machines. Steven.com brings what Bartlett describes as audience building, data, content and the commercialisation of digital media. Authentic adds retail, product, licensing, rights and global distribution. According to the press release, OBSN is also a platform with its own news, analysis and live events for the creator economy. It is already running and has over one million followers on Instagram.
The difference in scale between the two partners matters. According to its own figures, Authentic owns more than 50 brands, operates in more than 150 countries, and its brands generate around $38 billion in annual retail sales. It is a company that buys and licenses names such as Reebok or Sports Illustrated and has partners around the world manufacture them. Bartlett's side brings the audience and attention, while Authentic brings the production and distribution machinery of a brand.
The thesis of the whole move is captured in one Bartlett sentence. “The next generation of global media companies and consumer brands will be built around creators. But a global audience of millions is not yet a company,” he said, according to Podnews. The audience is the raw material, and the company is the second step. OBSN presents itself as the one that will take that second step.
A new type of player around creators
Matt Maddox, president and CEO of Authentic, places creators in the role of future brands. “Creators are redefining media and shaping the future of entertainment, with many poised to become multigenerational brands in their own right,” he said in the press release. The language is the same Authentic uses for sports and fashion brands. In it, a creator is measured by what can be licensed from their name.
This gives OBSN a different position from a classic talent agency. An agency represents a creator and takes a commission on their deals. OBSN wants to invest in creators, build products and rights around them, and take a share of the resulting company. Steven.com describes itself as a partner, “the one the highest-potential creators choose as their partner as they scale”. Bartlett does with creators what Authentic does with brands, except that the source of value is a living audience instead of a nostalgic logo.
A wave of holdings around audiences
OBSN is not alone in this logic. In June 2026, the agency CAA and the fund TPG launched Compound Creative Holdings through their Integrated Media Company holding, a $250 million company for buying and scaling creator-economy businesses.
In the same month, the consultancy Accenture bought the agency Whalar and placed it under Accenture Song. Whalar has more than 170 people in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Germany and Spain, and over the past ten years it has run creator campaigns worth more than $600 million. The parties did not disclose the value of the deal, but Whalar co-founder Neil Waller described it as the largest transaction in the history of the creator economy.
Capital is flowing into structures that build entire companies around creators, with their own rights and products.
Bartlett's own company is already being valued on the same logic. CreatorsHub previously described how a holding valued at $425 million grew around his podcast. The tie-up with Authentic continues the same story on a global scale. Bartlett is not only building his own company. He is building infrastructure through which the same movement could bring other creators' audiences into business.
European brands are getting a creator as a competitor
For a brand manager, the change in the creator's role is significant. As long as the creator was an advertising channel, the brand bought reach from them. Once a firm forms around a creator with its own product, licensing and distribution, that creator becomes a competitor on the shelf next to the advertiser's own brands. The model OBSN is trying globally is so far being built in Europe piece by piece. The agency of Arcade, Europe's largest YouTube group, is turning into a media company and preparing the first European upfront for creators, a format until now reserved for television networks.
The question of returns remains open. The goal of deploying up to $400 million is a declaration of intent, not a result. Authentic knows how to turn an old brand into a licensing stream, but with a living creator, value depends on their attention, and that can be lost faster than the rights to a logo. OBSN will only show whether an audience can be turned into a lasting brand, or whether the capital is buying reach that will fade.
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