Fly By News – Week of 12/15

Picture a Monday morning where your CFO is asking one question that is half budget, half existential: “Are we still paying for creative, or are we about to start paying for permission?”

That is the through-line behind this week’s Fly By News. The biggest platforms are quietly turning “content” into “licensed inventory,” “discovery” into “paid placement,” and “distribution” into an M&A knife fight. Your brand is not a spectator. You are a participant whether you RSVP’d or not.

Below are the actionable implications for brands, based on four stories you can actually plan around.

1) Disney’s $1B OpenAI bet: licensed imagination is the new product surface area

Disney investing $1 billion in OpenAI and licensing characters into Sora is not a cute headline. It’s an early blueprint for how premium IP will be used in generative video, and how the biggest rights-holders plan to make fan content feel “official” while staying controlled. Reuters reported the $1B investment and licensing arrangement, with guardrails like excluding talent likenesses or voices. Disney and OpenAI also published their own announcements about the partnership, including the scope of licensed characters and product plans.

What this changes for brands that are not Disney

Most brands do not have Mickey Mouse. But you do have IP, even if you have never called it that. Your packaging look, your product photography style, your brand character, your jingles, your signature motion graphics, your founder’s face, your customer testimonials, your UGC library, your type treatments, your “we always shoot on white seamless” aesthetic. That is all IP, and generative tools can remix it in seconds.

The Disney move signals a future where:

• “Safe” generative creation happens inside licensed sandboxes. Fans can create, but inside pre-set limits. The Walt Disney Company

• Premium brands will offer “official” generative kits the way they offer brand guidelines today. The difference is the kit generates the assets, not just describes them. OpenAI

• Unlicensed fan video becomes legally riskier and commercially harder to scale. Not because fans stop, but because platforms and rights-holders finally have a productized alternative that is cleaner, safer, and monetizable. Reuters

The brand playbook: build your “licensed creativity” layer before someone else does

Here’s a practical sequence you can run in Q1 without turning your brand into a legal hostage.

Step 1: Create an internal “IP asset registry” that marketing actually uses.
Not a dusty folder called “Brand.” A living list with:

• What assets exist (product shots, packaging renders, logo locks, audio stings, founder headshots, influencer content you own usage rights to)

• Who owns it (you, agency, creator, photographer)

• What the license allows (paid usage, organic only, time limits, territories, edit rights)

If you cannot answer “Do we have paid usage rights for this creator video?” in under two minutes, you are not ready for generative scaling.

Step 2: Update creator contracts with generative clauses.
You want language that covers:

• Whether creators can use generative tools on your footage

• Whether you can use generative tools on their likeness/voice (most brands should be conservative here)

• Clear do-not-do rules (no altering claims, no fabricating endorsements, no synthetic medical results, no fake “before/after”)

This is boring until it saves you six figures and a crisis week.

Step 3: Build a “brand-safe generation kit” for your team and partners.
Even if you are not licensing into Sora, you can still standardize how people generate on-brand visuals and clips:

• Approved prompts (with guardrails)

• Disallowed prompts (a literal blacklist)

• Style references (shot types, lighting, pacing, typography)

• Review workflow (who approves what, and when)

If you want a north star for this kind of system thinking, Hawke’s GEO work is rooted in the same principle: structure first, scale second.

Step 4: Treat “fan creation” like a channel, not a vibe.
Disney is essentially productizing fan creation and curating outputs on Disney+. Brands can do a smaller version:

• Monthly prompt challenges with clear rules

• A submission portal with explicit rights terms

• Featured placements (site, email, TikTok, paid ads when permitted)

The trick is not more fan content. The trick is usable fan content.

2) “Gemini ads aren’t coming”… and yet, monetization is already in the room with us

Google’s VP of Global Ads publicly denied that ads are coming to the Gemini app “under current plans,” after reporting suggested the opposite. Whether you believe the denial or the rumor is less important than the fact that the conversation is happening at all.

Because the economics are simple: AI experiences are expensive to run, and the internet’s most reliable business model is still “pay to be discovered.”

What brands should do now (even if Gemini stays ad-free for a while)

Stop thinking “ads in chat” and start thinking “ranking in answers.”

When a buyer asks an AI tool, “What’s the best electrolyte drink for post-run cramps?” or “Which sofa brand ships fastest to LA?” your brand is either:

1. mentioned with confidence,

2. ignored, or

3. misrepresented.

That is why GEO and AEO moved from “interesting” to “oh no” in 2025. Hawke’s GEO overview frames it plainly: structure your content and data so AI systems recognize, trust, and recommend you.

A tight operational checklist for “AI answer readiness”

You can run this like a sprint.

Sprint A: Make your facts un-mess-up-able

• Ensure product names, variants, pricing logic, ingredients/materials, and guarantees are consistent across site, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and retailer pages.

• Create one canonical “source of truth” page per hero SKU that includes specs, FAQs, claims substantiation, and plain-language benefits.

Sprint B: Add structure that machines can read

• Implement Product, FAQ, Review, and Organization schema where appropriate.

• Build Q&A content that mirrors real prompts, not keyword-stuffed blog titles.

Sprint C: Strengthen third-party corroboration
AI tools lean on what they can verify. Build:

• Credible reviews

• Press mentions

• Partner pages

• Marketplace listings with clean metadata

This is also where being disciplined about “AI slop” matters. Flooding the zone with low-quality AI content makes your brand look less trustworthy, not more. Hawke has a solid explainer on that risk:

Prepare for the monetized version without waiting for it

Even if Gemini ads are not “currently planned,” the likely future is paid placements across AI surfaces such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. That means your paid and organic teams should start aligning now on:

• Query categories that matter (problem-aware, solution-aware, competitor comparisons)

• Assets needed for each category (short demos, spec sheets, social proof, landing pages)

• Measurement approach (incrementality tests, not just last-click)

3) Streaming M&A Hunger Games: plan for inventory shock and measurement chaos

This is not a normal “media deal rumor.” Reuters reporting and follow-up coverage indicate Netflix is pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios and HBO assets, and Paramount Skydance launched a large hostile bid that escalated the situation. The Financial Times described it as a high-stakes takeover battle with massive price tags and a looming decision window. Financial Times

Why marketers should care (beyond cocktail party takes)

Because ownership changes ad products. It changes:

• What inventory exists and where

• What targeting is allowed

• What measurement tools get prioritized

• What gets bundled, what gets deprecated, what suddenly costs more

A realistic scenario: your 2026 CTV plan assumes stable access to HBO inventory, certain audience segments, and specific measurement integrations. Then the buyer shifts strategy, restructures tiers, or bundles aggressively with its own ecosystem.

The brand response: build a “CTV resilience plan”

This is how you keep performance steady when the media landscape is rearranging furniture mid-dinner.

1) Diversify by outcome, not by publisher name
Instead of “we buy Netflix, Max, Hulu,” define buckets:

• Prospecting reach

• Mid-funnel education (video completion, site engagement)

• Retargeting and conversion assists

Then allocate supply across partners that can fulfill each outcome.

2) Lock creative formats that travel well
M&A changes platforms. Your creative should not be fragile. Prioritize:

• 15s and 30s versions

• Clear first three seconds (yes, on TV too)

• Subtitles baked in

• Strong product truth without needing sound

3) Make measurement portable

• Use consistent naming conventions and UTMs where possible

• Build MMM inputs now so you are not scrambling later

• Run lift tests periodically so you have benchmarked performance before inventory shifts

If you need a service anchor for this, Hawke’s Connected TV work is built around cross-device integration and performance tracking, not “spray and pray TV.” 

4) TikTok Shop’s $500M BFCM moment and the org reshuffle: the signal is “speed wins”

TikTok Shop reported that BFCM was its biggest weekend ever, with sales exceeding $500 million over the four-day period. Business Insider also reported the $500M figure and detailed TikTok’s restructuring of ecommerce product and data teams afterward, with centralization tied to AI and measurement. Business Insider+1

For context, Adobe reported total U.S. online sales of $44.2B across the five-day Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday period, and $14.25B on Cyber Monday alone. TikTok is still a slice of the pie, but it is a slice that is growing fast. EMARKETER pegged TikTok Shop’s 2025 U.S. sales at $15.82B and about 18.2% share of U.S. social commerce. 

The actionable takeaway: if your product can demo in seconds, TikTok Shop is a performance channel, not just “social”

A believable pattern we’ve seen: brands that treat TikTok Shop like “another storefront” underperform. Brands that treat it like a live, always-on demo machine win.

A practical TikTok Shop sprint plan (30 days)

• Week 1: Fix your storefront physics
  • Clean titles and thumbnails

  • Tight benefit bullets

  • Shipping clarity

  • Review capture flow

• Week 2: Build a creator sampling engine
  • Identify 50 to 200 creators who already make your type of content

  • Offer simple briefs that prioritize demo speed and honest reaction

  • Track content output like paid creative testing

• Week 3: Turn winning videos into distribution
  • Spark Ads on top performers

  • Retarget video viewers with shop offers

  • Layer affiliate incentives where it makes sense

• Week 4: Instrument measurement like it matters
  • SKU-level reporting

  • Post-purchase surveys (“Where did you hear about us?”)

  • Incrementality tests if you have spend volume

Hawke has dedicated TikTok Shop support for exactly this ecosystem, including setup, affiliate enablement, and post-click optimization. And if your next question is “how do we keep scaling without guessing,” that is where disciplined testing comes in. Hawke’s AI-driven A/B testing overview is a useful refresher on building smarter experiments without drowning in variables. 

The unifying strategy for this week: treat “distribution” as a controlled asset again

Disney is turning generative creativity into licensed inventory. Google is showing that AI monetization is not hypothetical, even when denied. Streaming platforms are fighting over who owns the pipes and the studios. TikTok Shop is proving that short-form demos can print revenue, and then reorganizing to scale.

So the move for brands is not to chase headlines. The move is to tighten your operational grip on three things:

1. Rights (what you can use, remix, and scale safely)

2. Readability (so AI systems and humans can understand your product fast)

3. Resilience (so channel shifts do not wreck your pipeline)

If you want a simple place to start, do this tomorrow: pick one hero product and run it through the three R’s. You will find gaps quickly. Those gaps are future revenue leaks.