GTA didn’t build a game. It built a franchise. Most marketing plans don’t know the difference.

By Ryan Ferguson, Managing Director, Snap Inc. ANZ

One of my first jobs was working for a video games publisher in Media Sales - back when magazines still made more money than websites. That changed fast. So did gaming: what was once a niche category now transcends demographics, spawning movies, TV shows and cultural moments that rival anything in mainstream entertainment.

Few product launches have been waited on like GTA VI. More than a decade after GTA V, Rockstar is preparing to do what the franchise has always done: evolve without losing what made people love it in the first place. GTA endures because Rockstar knows what to protect and what to reinvent. Here are three things it can teach anyone building a brand about staying relevant.

1. Play the long game. And the short one.

Every GTA release is built for the audience that’s coming, not the one that showed up last time. GTA VI has a female co-protagonist for the first time in the franchise’s history. Rockstar didn’t do that to tick a box - they did it because they read where gaming culture was heading before it arrived. That’s the discipline: absorb street culture, music, fashion, celebrity, and understand who the next player is before anyone else has named them.

The question worth asking isn’t just “do you know who your audience is?” - that’s the starting point. The more interesting one is: is your plan designed to earn reach, or just buy it? GTA Online answered it. What started as a multiplayer add-on became a living world that players brought their friends into. The franchise didn’t retain an audience. It built a loyalty engine, and the engine did the media buying.

And loyal audiences pay. GTA Online charges monthly because the world is worth being part of, and that loyalty runs on private conversation, not broadcast reach. Mindscope recently found that real conversations have overtaken passive scrolling among Australians for the first time, meaning the medium itself has shifted. The question for any agency building a 2027 plan isn’t where you spent last year. It’s where the conversation is happening, not just what’s on the feed.

2. Have the guts to disrupt yourself

When Rockstar shifted focus to GTA VI, GTA Online was still generating enormous revenue. They wound back new content for a game that was, by any commercial measure, still performing. They killed a working engine to build a better one. Most planning teams never make that call, because when something is fine, fine feels safe.

And that complacency has a cost.

The real wastage problem in media isn’t bad spend. It’s complacent spend. Research from Amplified found Australian brands could be losing 63 cents of every social dollar on ads audiences aren’t watching, not from poor creative but from poor placement. Environment sets the ceiling for attention, and creative can’t compensate for a low-attention placement.

The industry has a name for what this produces at scale: a sea of sameness, where the system rewards repetition and efficiency quietly replaces ambition. Doing the same thing and getting the same result isn’t a strategy. It’s inertia dressed up as consistency.

The plans that break through are built by teams willing to look at what’s working well enough and ask whether it could work brilliantly. That question is harder to ask when the numbers are green. It’s also the only question worth asking.

3. Even Rockstar needs Kai Cenat

GTA is one of the most valuable entertainment franchises in history. Rockstar could have launched GTA VI on cultural gravity alone. They didn’t need to ask twice.

Right now, Kai Cenat - 22 million Twitch followers, two-time Streamer of the Year - is running a five-game GTA marathon ahead of the launch. Just a guy who has loved this franchise since Vice City as a kid, going back to the beginning with tens of millions of people watching.

Rockstar didn’t activate Cenat. They built something that activated him, two decades later. That’s the difference between a brand people work for and a brand people love.

The same principle applies closer to home. Chemist Warehouse’s most effective creative asset isn’t a media buy - it’s Jess, an employee whose casual, behind-the-counter style has become the backbone of the brand’s social presence. When she showed up in Snapchat users’ chat feeds for the Mayhem sale, she didn’t feel like an ad. She felt like someone your friend follows. That’s the difference.

Most creator briefs work the other way: the agency drafts it, the creator delivers it, the audience notices. Content built to work everywhere tends to connect with no one. When the relationship is genuine - when the creator actually loves the product and the agency is willing to step back - the dynamic flips. They bring their community to the campaign, because the most valuable conversations about your brand are shared, not served.

GTA didn’t become a franchise by running good campaigns. It became one by applying the same discipline, release after release, decade after decade. Know who the next audience is before anyone else does, question what’s comfortable, and build with people who already believe.

That’s not a marketing plan. That’s a franchise. Start building one.