NEWS

Fanbytes announces new reality-style online show

Published on: 9th April 2020

Opportunity for toy brands to partner with Fanbytes for online exposure.

Fanbytes, the world’s leading Gen Z agency, has launched ByteHouse, a three-month online show featuring the UK’s biggest TikTok talent in the form of the Bytesquad – the UK’s first ever TikTok squad, comprising six of the biggest TikTok stars in the country.

This show is the second big project from ByteSized Talent, the talent management arm of Fanbytes. Currently the largest dedicated talent agency for TikTok, BytesizedTalent manages the careers of over 40 talent influencers with over 55m fans, helping them build brands using TikTok through merchandising and IP development.

The show is set to launch publicly on April 3rd, with the influencers – Shauni (19) SurfaceLdn (22), Seb (20) Monty (17) KT Franklin (19) and Lily Rose (20) – having moved into the Victorian townhouse, situated in central London, prior to the nationwide lockdown. Byte House is “what would happen if Big Brother and TikTok had a baby,” says Fanbytes founder Timothy Armoo.

Participating brands include global games company What Do You Meme, which is sponsoring a regular games night in the house. Rise Above, an organisation which uses behaviour change to delay and prevent risky behaviours from young people and give them the best start in life, is also working with the house as an opportunity to create widespread awareness and encouraging people to remain active through the coronavirus lockdown. Several record labels are also using the house to drive engagement around their songs, and more brands have signed which cannot yet be revealed.

“Toy brands can challenge our stars,” explained Timothy. “For example, one of our Tiktok stars – SurfaceLDN – created a video that got 90m views, and if you look at his content you’ll see that all the toy content goes insane. Toy brands could also partner with us to build limited-edition ByteHouse toys or games, miniature figures for example, while games companies can be part of games night. We’re currently seeing 10m views a week on our content; that’s just been the past week and it’s set to rise.”

Timothy added: “Since the beginning, we’ve always seen ourselves as being leaders in Gen Z marketing. This expands from helping brands win the hearts of Gen Z audience to owning and operating the most engaging programming on social to merchandising. The Bytesquad comprises some of the most entertaining and talented people there are and I’m extremely excited to see what we can cook up. In a world where younger audiences are moving away from linear TV and moving online and more specifically moving to social, it’s ever more important for programming to be created by Gen Z for Gen Z. Our role in this is very simply to just be the curator, and let the experts do their thing.”

In its first week, the Bytehouse channel gained 15m video views overall for its content. The six members of the Bytesquad currently attracts 86m views per week on TikTok, up from 70m when they first started out, and each video is averaging 250k views.

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