March, 2026.- In the 2026 media landscape, where attention is the most volatile currency, Dexerto has achieved what many traditional giants envy: being the authentic voice of millions of Gen Z and Millennials. Under the leadership of Luke Bristow, the new President for EMEA, the platform is not only consolidating its position as a content giant in gaming, creator culture, and entertainment but is also evolving into a technology-driven cultural intelligence platform. For Bristow, Dexerto’s success lies not just in its billions of impressions, but in a “cultural authority” that allows brands to understand what matters to the next generation in real-time—long before it shows up in any traditional market report. With proprietary tools like Dexpert, Dexerto is redefining the relationship between media and brand, shifting from an ad space to a strategic intelligence partner.
In this exclusive interview with Roastbrief, Luke Bristow breaks down his ambitious roadmap to move away from passive monetization and build an ecosystem of owned intellectual property and independent ad-tech. With a vision forged in the agency world and influencer marketing, Bristow analyzes why speed now trumps production value and how brands must learn to participate in communities rather than simply interrupting them. From integrating AI to decode audience behaviors to an acquisition strategy that prioritizes strategic control, Luke invites us to discover how Dexerto protects its authentic DNA while scaling globally. In a world where audiences “simply don’t care about your brand,” Bristow reveals the formula for content to be an invitation to discovery and why, in 2026, community trust is the most valuable and difficult asset to replicate.
Intro to Dexerto and what makes us different
At Dexerto we describe ourselves as the voice of an emerging culture. Which is a tagline, but essentially means we’ve built a very engaged community of millions of Gen Z and Millennials who we reach every month across media we own and operate.
We publish across gaming, influencer culture, movies and TV, sports and food – the verticals the next generation cares most about. That’s what we mean when we say ’emerging culture.’
We’re one of the biggest and most engaged in the world. Just to give you a snapshot; billions of social media impressions, hundreds of millions of website page views and hundreds of millions of video views on our original shows and IP every month.
But being big isn’t what makes us special.
Our audience trust us because of our editorial edge and tone, which is very different to the establishment; far more peer-to-peer, with entertainment at its core and giving them “inside access” to some of the most well known influencers and celebrities; from MrBeast to Chris Pratt.
- Dexerto has built massive cultural relevance with Gen Z and Millennials. As President, EMEA, how do you plan to translate that influence into long-term business value and sustainable growth?
First and foremost, the company is already doing a lot of this work without my input!
But one of the words that we have used internally a lot is how the business is “undermonetised” – relative to our reach and influence – and there is a huge untapped potential for commercial growth. A year or two ago we were heavily reliant on programmatic advertising, which is the most passive way to monetize audience at scale. We’ve shifted a lot toward direct partnerships since then, but there’s still significant material upside.
But the real shift will happen when brands stop seeing us as a media buy and start seeing us as a source of intelligence they can’t get anywhere else. They don’t just want access to our audience. They want to understand what Gen Z actually cares about, in real-time, before it shows up in their own data six months later.
We’re building products that only we can build, because nobody else has that combination of cultural authority and proprietary data.
- Your role includes transforming Dexerto from a high-growth publisher into a technology-enabled media platform. What does that shift actually look like in practice — and where do you see the biggest opportunities?
Great question. Again, there is a huge amount of work the team have delivered already on this, I’m just giving it a bit of extra focus.
Publishing and content is still the foundation. We’re not walking away from that. It’s our competitive advantage and we remain devoted to providing best in class entertainment to our engaged communities.
But we need to layer technology underneath it to capture more of the value we’re creating.
In practice, there’s a few areas we’re focused on:
First, we’re building proprietary tools in-house. One example is Dexpert – our real-time LLM platform that takes first-party data from a decade of audience behaviour across every community we own and turns it into actionable intelligence brands can use immediately. Through Dexpert, we can answer questions about why and how to activate with Gen Z, so brands can invest with conviction.
Second, we’re investing in our own ad-tech capabilities. The goal is to have more control over how our inventory gets monetized and priced, rather than being completely dependent on third-party ad servers. We think we can capture more of the value chain and give clients better outcomes at the same time.
Third, we need to diversify our IP within and outside of platforms. When Meta, Google or TikTok change their algorithm, it can impact a lot of publisher revenue. Owned distribution and direct relationships with our audience will allow us to be in control of our own destiny more often than not.
- You’ve spoken about turning cultural authority into strategic value. How do you balance preserving Dexerto’s authentic voice with scaling commercial products like data, ad tech, and owned networks?
This is the challenge that has killed a few modern media companies who scaled too quickly over the last decade.
The short answer is we have some structural advantages that others didn’t. Dexerto isn’t one big monolithic brand trying to be everything to everyone. We’re a network of really specific communities – gaming, creator culture, sports, food – and each one has dedicated teams who are genuine natives in those spaces.
When you have a writer who’s part of the community they serve, they’re not going to compromise their credibility to make an advertiser happy. Our audience would call it out immediately if we tried.
Practically speaking, we maintain proper editorial walls. But we’re also smarter about how we work with brands commercially. We help brands create content and experiences that our communities actually want to engage with.
Our recent McDonald’s x Grinch campaign is a good example of this. We partnered with tier-1 creators and amplified via Dexerto channels where the audience could guide what happened in real-time. The whole thing was interactive and community-first. McDonald’s became part of the fun with Dexerto fans, rather than an interruption.
The reality is pretty simple: if our community stops trusting us, the entire business model falls apart. So maintaining authenticity isn’t some nice-to-have. It’s critical.
- Strategic acquisitions are a core part of your mandate. What kinds of companies or capabilities are you looking to add to Dexerto’s ecosystem globally?
I’m obviously not going to name specific targets, but I can talk about how we’re thinking about it.
We’re looking at three main buckets.
First is technology and infrastructure. These are companies that give us capabilities we’d otherwise have to build from scratch – ad tech that’s already scaled, data infrastructure, tools for the creator economy. Basically, we want to own more of our stack rather than licensing everything from third parties.
Second is strategic services. Dexerto is increasingly playing more of an advisory role with brands, not just selling them media placements. So if there are agencies or consultancies out there with specific capabilities around youth marketing, creator partnerships, cultural strategy – things that would accelerate what we’re already doing – those are interesting to us.
Third is content IP and audience. But we’re being selective here. We’re not doing roll-ups where we just buy a bunch of similar properties to get bigger. We’re looking for brands or creators that authentically extend our cultural position without diluting what makes us special. The idea is we can plug them into our existing distribution and monetization infrastructure and everybody wins.
The common thread across all of this is we’re trying to build an ecosystem, not just get bigger for the sake of it. Every acquisition should either give us new capabilities, access to new audiences, or proprietary technology that makes our existing advantages stronger. We’re not buying companies just for revenue multiples. We’re buying for strategic control of the audience.
And yes, there will be some announcements on this front in the near term.
- Coming from both media agency and influencer backgrounds, how does that experience shape your approach to building new revenue streams and partnerships for a youth-first platform like Dexerto?
Having spent over 15 years on the agency side, including various secondments into brands, I’ve experienced the frustrations that our partners and clients deal with every day. I’ve walked in the customer’s shoes, if you like.
This means I have pretty good pattern recognition at knowing what doesn’t work as much as what does. I’ve seen enough failed initiatives and wasted budgets. So we’re not going to waste time building low-margin, high-effort solutions that nobody’s actually going to buy.
In terms of what does matter; there’s this massive gap in brands and agencies around cultural intelligence. Our editorial teams see these shifts happening in real-time – what’s working in gaming, what’s resonating in creator culture, what’s breaking through in sports communities. They see it before it shows up in anyone’s research reports six months later. That’s the kind of intelligence brands are desperate for but can’t really get anywhere else.
On the influencer side, Dexerto have a level of credibility with creators that I’ve never seen before, because of our editorial roots. This is what has allowed us to do in-depth interviews with the biggest streamers and YouTubers in the world like MrBeast. Dexerto doesn’t just observe creator culture. We report on it, interview it, and operate at the centre of its highs, lows, and flashpoints. That proximity gives us an instinct for creator relevance, tone of voice, and cultural risk than agencies whose role with creators is primarily transactional and brief-led.
- Gaming, creators, and digital entertainment are evolving fast. What trends do you believe brands and media companies still underestimate when trying to reach younger audiences?
So, there are a couple of things that still surprise me about how brands approach this.
Firstly, audiences genuinely do not care about your brand. At all. I see so many CMOs who expect Gen Z to engage with their corporate content just because they made it feel ‘authentic’ or ‘relatable.’ they don’t. If your brand adds something valuable to that experience, great. If not, you’re just getting in the way.
Second, community is fundamentally different from consumption, and most brands still don’t get that distinction. That’s why platforms like Discord and Reddit are winning. They’re built for participation, not just distribution. Brands that don’t understand that are going to become irrelevant.
Third, speed is more important than production value now. I see brands spending six months developing a campaign to reach Gen Z, and by the time it actually launches, the cultural moment has completely passed. Dexerto publishes hundreds of pieces of content every single day because we’re native to internet speed. That’s just the pace that culture moves at now. If you’re working on a six-month production timeline, that’s probably your biggest liability right there.
- Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, what does success look like for Dexerto under your leadership — and how do you ensure growth doesn’t dilute the DNA that made the brand resonate in the first place?
So, I think about this in two ways -there’s the hard version and the soft version.
On the hard metrics: success is diversifying our revenue and building higher-margin products, with all of the expected upside in our financials.
But the soft metrics are probably more important, as without them, we won’t have a financially successful business.
Success is becoming the default answer when someone asks, ‘Who actually understands what Gen Z and Millennials care about?’ We want to be the company that defines how brands successfully reach and influence the next generation of wealth holders and spenders.
In regard to the DNA that made the brand resonate in the first place. Diluting this is an impossibility, else we’ll be absorbed into the corporate seas of sameness – where many of the traditional media establishment are occupying.
