How Creator Marketing Can Connect TV, Streaming and Publishers With New Audiences

TV, streaming, publishing and creator marketing are often treated as separate channels competing for the same audience attention.

But some of the most interesting media marketing we're seeing right now is doing the opposite: bringing them together.

Big Brother UK's 2026 launch is a great example of how creator partnerships can help traditional media reach social-first audiences, without asking those audiences to abandon the platforms and creators they already spend time with.

ITV didn't just hire influencers to post that Big Brother was back. It opened up the programme itself, giving creators access to its biggest assets and allowing their audiences to enter the Big Brother universe through Twitch, YouTube and social before encouraging them towards ITV2 and ITVX.

For broadcasters, streaming platforms, publishers and other media companies looking at how creator marketing can complement their existing channels, there's a lot to learn from it.

How Big Brother turned a TV launch into a creator event

Before the 2026 series had even begun, ITV handed the Big Brother house to Manchester creator collective The Bov Boys for 24 hours.

Importantly, they weren't entering as traditional contestants.

They were taking part in the show's pre-series "dry run", an operational rehearsal used to test the house, cameras and production set-up before the actual housemates arrive.

Previously, that happened behind closed doors.

In 2026, ITV turned it into content.

For the first time in Big Brother UK history, audiences could watch the entire dry run, with the takeover livestreamed continuously across Twitch and YouTube. The stream appeared on individual Bov Boys Twitch channels as well as Big Brother UK and ITV Reality's YouTube channels.

Suddenly, something that was already happening as part of television production became a 24-hour creator activation.

That's an important distinction for media companies thinking about creator marketing.

ITV didn't need to invent an entirely new experience. It identified something audiences normally couldn't access and handed that access to creators.

One creator partnership became an audience network

ITV also went beyond partnering with a single influencer.

The Bov Boys takeover brought together Angry Ginge, Tays, Jakey Davies and Chazza, while other established creators including Adeola Patronne, Mariam Musa, Shauna Games, Scouse Mali and former Big Brother contestant Pieface joined the activity.

That effectively created a network of different creator communities around one television property.

Each creator brought their own audience, cultural relevance and content style, while co-streaming meant the experience could live within the creator environments those audiences already understood.

Instead of saying:

"Big Brother is back. Watch it on ITV."

The activation gave audiences a reason to experience Big Brother through people they already followed.

That's a much stronger bridge between creator audiences and traditional media.

ITV met creator audiences where they already were

The platform strategy is just as interesting.

ITV could have made the takeover an ITVX exclusive and used the creators primarily to drive traffic towards its own streaming platform.

Instead, the 24-hour event was available through Twitch and YouTube, including the creators' individual Twitch accounts.

That removes a significant piece of friction.

A Twitch audience didn't need to change its behaviour to participate. It could watch Big Brother within Twitch, alongside the creators it already followed, using the live-chat and community behaviours already native to that platform.

Big Brother effectively travelled into creator culture first.

The audience could come back towards the broadcaster later.

Then ITV connected creator content back to the programme

This is where the strategy becomes much more interesting than a conventional influencer campaign.

The creator activation didn't end when the 24-hour stream finished.

Tays subsequently became Big Brother's secret mole, meaning someone audiences had first watched during the creator takeover became part of the programme's ongoing story.

That creates continuity between the activation and the core media property.

The creator isn't sitting outside the programme saying, "Go and watch this."

They're inside its world.

For broadcasters and streaming platforms, that's a potentially powerful shift in how creator partnerships are structured. Creators can be more than promotional media inventory. They can become talent, characters, access points, commentators and participants within entertainment IP itself.

Big Brother also redesigned its companion content for a multi-platform audience

ITV took a similar approach to the conversation surrounding the programme.

For 2026, Big Brother: The Group Chat replaced Big Brother: Late & Live, with former winner Kate Lawler joined by creator and podcaster GK Barry.

But the distribution is perhaps more significant than the presenter line-up.

The Group Chat airs after Big Brother across ITV2, ITVX and YouTube, while episodes are also distributed across major podcast platforms.

That turns what would once have primarily been an aftershow into something much more portable.

You can watch Big Brother on television, stream it on ITVX, encounter the wider conversation through YouTube, listen through a podcast platform and then see clips and creator commentary elsewhere on social.

The boundaries between television, streaming, podcasting and creator content become much less important.

The programme becomes the centre of an ecosystem rather than the only destination.

And audiences appear to be responding

There are encouraging early results around the 2026 series.

During its first Sunday-to-Friday period, Big Brother generated 4.9 million ITVX streams, compared with 3.7 million during the equivalent period in 2025.

That's an increase of 32% year on year.

The launch episode consolidated at 1.4 million viewers, while both the Sunday and Monday episodes during week two were 10% higher than their 2025 equivalents. Big Brother: The Group Chat was also 9% ahead of the comparable performance of the previous year's Late & Live.

The streaming growth continued.

After 13 episodes, ITV reported 12.7 million ITVX streams, compared with 8.5 million at the same point in the previous series - an increase of 50%.

It's important not to attribute that growth entirely to creator marketing. Cast, programming, publicity, format changes and wider audience interest will all influence viewing.

But the results demonstrate something important: extending a traditional television property into creator platforms doesn't have to cannibalise the main product.

It can create more routes into it.

The opportunity for TV networks, streaming platforms and publishers

This is something we're increasingly thinking about at Pepper when working across TV, streaming, print and digital publishing.

Media companies already possess something brands spend huge amounts of money trying to create: culturally interesting assets.

There are sets; studios; archives; journalists; presenters; actors; premieres; production processes; interviews; stories; characters; events; expertise and established IP.

The creator marketing opportunity isn't necessarily to put an influencer beside those assets and ask them to promote them.

It's to ask:

What could we give creators access to that their audiences wouldn't normally see?

Big Brother's dry run is a perfect example.

The production process already existed. Creator involvement transformed it from an operational necessity into a public entertainment event.

The same thinking can apply well beyond reality television.

A publisher could give creators access to journalists, investigations, archives or cultural moments behind a story. A streaming platform could bring creators into premieres, production environments or the worlds surrounding new releases. A broadcaster could build creators into formats or use them to reinterpret archive content for social-first audiences.

The asset already exists.

Creator strategy gives it another distribution layer.

Publishers can think beyond sharing links to articles

There's a particularly interesting opportunity here for digital and print publishers.

Creator marketing for publishers shouldn't just mean paying someone to share an article.

Publishers have editorial authority, expertise, access and stories. Creators have communities, personality-led distribution and the ability to translate subjects into platform-native formats.

Put those together and one piece of journalism can potentially become far more than a webpage.

A journalist and creator could unpack a story together; creators could receive access behind a feature or investigation; an editorial franchise could become a recurring social format; archive journalism could be rediscovered through new creator communities; or a creator could become part of the story's distribution from its inception.

The creator isn't replacing the journalist or publisher.

They're providing another entry point into their work.

Your audience doesn't think in media channels

Perhaps the biggest reason media companies should be thinking about creator partnerships is that audiences don't organise their attention according to a media plan.

Someone might first encounter a programme through a Twitch streamer, watch a clip on TikTok, find the full episode on ITVX, listen to a podcast discussing it the following morning and read an interview with its star later that day.

To them, that's not five channels.

It's one interest.

Media businesses therefore have an opportunity to stop treating creator, social, streaming, editorial and broadcast audiences as completely separate groups.

The more interesting question is how audiences can move between them.

Pepper's perspective: creator marketing should connect audiences, not compete for them

At Pepper, we don't see creator marketing as something that needs to sit separately from traditional media.

Increasingly, we're working with TV, streaming and publishing channels to connect their existing media assets with creator and social audiences.

That means starting with the media property itself.

What access can creators have? What can they experience that audiences normally can't? Which parts of the production or editorial process could become content? Which creators have communities that naturally overlap with the subject? And, crucially, where should that audience go next?

Because reach alone isn't the most interesting opportunity.

The goal is to create a journey.

TV to TikTok. Print to creator. Twitch to streaming. YouTube to broadcast. Creator community to media property - and back again.

Big Brother's 2026 strategy demonstrates what happens when creators stop being treated simply as another promotional channel and start becoming part of the distribution and storytelling model itself.

For media owners, publishers, broadcasters and streaming platforms, that's the opportunity.

You don't necessarily need to build a new audience from scratch. You need to create better connections between the audiences you and creators already have.

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