At MIPCOM on Sunday, Dhar Mann detailed a production campus that looks less like a soundstage and more like a branded backlot. Creator City, the four-acre Dhar Mann Studios site announced for a Super Bowl-week opening, will house 175 sets and can run 15 productions at the same time. The pitch is that creators are not renting empty soundstages; they are shooting inside branded environments.
Why branded sets change the deal
Mann said his current studio sets are unbranded because, five years ago, advertisers did not take YouTubers seriously. Creator City reverses that. Instead of a generic coffee shop, there might be a Starbucks; instead of a generic retail store, a Target. Launch brand partners are already lined up. That moves product integration from a one-off sponsorship to permanent set infrastructure.
“When you see content being created, it’s not just a random coffee shop, it could be a Starbucks,” Mann said.
For entertainment marketers, that is the shift to track. Brand placement becomes part of the physical production asset, not a post-production add-on. A brand can appear across every creator shoot that uses a set, which changes how media value is planned.
DMS builds a monthly IP slate
- Four-acre campus in Los Angeles
- 175 sets and 15 simultaneous productions
- Grand opening set for Super Bowl week
- One new YouTube original every month from December
Dhar Mann Studios is also expanding its Samsung relationship; the scripted series Unlikely Romances will be joined by Unlikely Families in the coming months. The company has existing deals with Disney and Fox, and Mann framed the strategy as digital-first: low-cost production and speed let DMS test more titles on its own channel before chasing platform buyers.
“Starting in December, every single month we are launching one new series on our YouTube,” Mann said.
What media teams can take from it
Speaking to a room of traditional TV executives, Mann offered a piece of career advice that also applies to marketing teams: “Don’t get married to your job title, get more married to the skills that you have, and develop those.” Creator studios are buying speed and platform-native production, not legacy process.
The broader signal is that creator studios are becoming media infrastructure. They are building the set, the brand pipeline and the slate at once. For planners and entertainment marketers, the action is to model branded sets as recurring inventory rather than single-campaign placement.
Source: Deadline
