By Calvin Innes | Fandom and Pop Culture Creative Strategist
There’s a moment that happens at every keynote, every workshop, and pretty much every brand strategy session I run. Someone in the room (usually the most senior person there) leans forward and says some version of the same thing: “I didn’t realise fandom was this serious.”
That’s exactly why I do this work.
Fandom isn’t niche. It isn’t a subculture. It isn’t teenagers screaming at a pop star. Fandom is the operating system of modern culture. It’s the engine behind buying decisions, brand loyalty, community behaviour, and the stories that actually stick. And still, most organisations treat it as a footnote, as a nice little add-on in a trend report, or quite often, just pass it on as being part of someone else’s department.
I’m here to change that.
How I Got Here (The Honest Version)
It’s quite a journey, honestly. And not exactly a straight line.
I started as a designer. Moved into creative direction. Ran my own agency for almost a decade. Spent 20-plus years working with most of the major agency groups and a good number of independents, wearing the slightly unusual combination of CD and strategist, which usually raised eyebrows, but made a hell of a lot of sense in the rooms that took time to understand the positioning.
Over that time, three things became clear to me.
The first: my best work was always shaped by pop culture and fandom, simply because it’s where I naturally live. I’m a sneakerhead. An ex-skater. A comic book nerd. A film geek. These aren’t hobbies I picked up to seem relevant; they’re how I’ve moved through the world my whole life, and they’ve informed the way I think about culture, identity, and what makes people genuinely loyal to something.
The second: agencies and brands were waking up to culture marketing. Some were doing it well, but most were scrambling to figure out what it actually meant in practice. Almost every major agency group was building a pop culture division, or trying to. The brief had changed. The instinct was right. The execution was (and still is) often all over the place.
The third: tenders and briefs, from independents right up to large multinationals, were routinely including a healthy chunk of “culture” or “community” marketing… without a clear idea of how to deliver it effectively. There was appetite everywhere. The expertise to match it was much harder to find.
Put those three things together: a genuinely unusual combination of creative, strategic, and psychological/insights experience; two decades of real agency-side application; and a lifetime of being the person in the room who actually gets the cultural stuff from the inside, and the path to specialising made complete sense.
Timing helped too. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.
The Fragmentation Thing (Which Is Actually Good News)
Here’s the counterintuitive part: the splintering of culture, the endless niches, micro-communities, and hyper-specific fandoms, sn’t the problem it looks like from the outside.
Yes, it’s harder to find a single cultural moment that reaches everyone. Yes, the idea of a mainstream is increasingly fictional. But what fragmentation actually means is that the communities that do exist are more focused, more coherent, and more deeply invested than mass audiences ever were. Which means the brands and organisations that understand those communities ( properly, not superficially) have access to something genuinely valuable: people who care intensely, and whose trust, once earned, is extraordinarily durable.
Deeper understanding of smaller communities is more important now than it has ever been. That’s the work I do.
What I Actually Do
I’m Calvin Innes, a Fandom and Pop Culture Creative Strategist. That’s a title that often needs some explination… so here goes. My work sits at the intersection of cultural strategy, creative consulting, and expert communication. I work with brands, agencies, media organisations, and leadership teams who want to genuinely understand fandom. That’s not performing as if they understand it, not exploiting it, but understanding it well enough to make smarter decisions, build more resonant campaigns, and speak to audiences who have become immune to anything that feels fake.
That work takes three main forms:
Consulting & Creative Strategy
I partner with organisations to bring fandom intelligence into their strategic thinking. This might mean auditing how a brand is showing up in fan spaces. It might mean helping a creative team understand the cultural codes and unspoken rules of a specific fandom before they launch a campaign. It might mean a longer-term embedded role, helping shape how an organisation thinks about community, loyalty, and participatory culture.
The through-line in every engagement is the same: I translate the complex, emotional, fiercely tribal world of fandom into language and frameworks that commercial and creative teams can actually use. With 20-plus years of agency-side experience behind that translation, the gap between insight and application tends to be a lot narrower than organisations expect.
Keynotes & Speaking
I speak at conferences, summits, festivals, and corporate events, for audiences ranging from marketing professionals and media executives to educators, technology leaders, and creative directors.
My talks aren’t trend reports. They’re not PowerPoint tours of what’s popular on TikTok this quarter. They’re substantive, perspective-shifting explorations of why fandom works the way it does, and what that means for the people in the room, whatever industry they’re in.
I’ve delivered keynotes and talks at Cannes, Golden Drum, Pop Cultur Summit, Holky z Marketingu, Indie Summit, including a TEDx, and spoken nationally and internationally on topics including the psychology of fan communities, the commercial power of participatory culture, the role of nostalgia and identity in modern consumption, and how organisations can build the kind of loyalty that fandoms generate naturally.
If you’ve ever sat through a conference keynote and thought “that was interesting, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with it”, my talks are built to feel different. Actionable. Memorable. The kind of session people are still talking about at dinner.
Workshops & Training
Keynotes change thinking. Workshops change behaviour.
I run bespoke workshops for teams who want to go deeper, to move from understanding fandom as a concept to actually applying it in their day-to-day work. These range from half-day creative sessions to multi-session programmes, and can be tailored to marketing teams, content creators, product teams, leadership groups, or cross-functional audiences.
The goal is always the same: leave with a new way of seeing, and the practical tools to act on it.
What Makes This Different
There is no shortage of people who will tell you that fandom matters. There is a much shorter list of people who can actually help you do something about it… and a shorter list still who have spent two decades applying creative and strategic thinking in real commercial environments before specialising.
The difference, in my experience, comes down to three things:
Depth over surface. Fan communities are sophisticated. They have history, internal politics, shared mythologies, and exquisitely calibrated sensors for when something is genuine and when it isn’t. Engaging with that world superficially, borrowing aesthetic cues without understanding the culture beneath them, tends to backfire badly and publicly. I bring the kind of depth that protects you from those mistakes and opens up the possibilities that only come with real understanding.
Strategy, not just insight. Understanding fandom is interesting. Knowing what to do with that understanding is where the value lies. Having spent my career at the creative and strategic end of agency work, I’m not here to hand you an insight and leave you with it. Every engagement is oriented toward practical outcomes, decisions made better, campaigns landed more effectively, teams thinking in ways they weren’t before.
Honest expertise. I’ll tell you what I actually think. If a strategy is likely to land badly in a fan community, I’ll say so. If an organisation’s instinct is right, I’ll build on it. The people I work with consistently tell me that the most valuable thing I bring isn’t just knowledge, it’s a perspective they can trust.
Who I Work With
My clients and collaborators span a wide range: global brands, independent agencies, broadcasters and streaming platforms, entertainment companies, event producers, educational institutions, and leadership teams across sectors who’ve realised that culture (specifically participatory culture) is now impossible to ignore.
The common thread isn’t industry. It’s a genuine curiosity about why people connect so deeply with the things they love, and a desire to understand that well enough to create something worthy of that connection.
Let’s Work Together
If you’re looking for a keynote speaker who will genuinely shift the way your audience thinks about culture, community, and loyalty, I’d love to talk.
If your brand, agency, or organisation needs strategic expertise in fandom and pop culture, let’s explore what that could look like.
If you want your team to come out of a workshop seeing the world differently, I can make that happen.
Get in touch at hey@calvininnes.com
Calvin Innes is a Fandom and Pop Culture Creative Strategist, TEDx speaker, keynote speaker, and consultant. With over 20 years of creative and strategic agency experience, he works with brands, agencies, and organisations to translate the power of fan culture into practical creative and commercial advantage.
