Dentsu Entertainment has formed a partnership with Iconic Arts, an entertainment and technology studio with offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Latin America. 

The partnership is focused on building scalable, data-driven intellectual property for brands across content, experiences, interactive media and consumer products, as brands increasingly seek ways to promote products beyond traditional ads and campaigns. 

One focus is anime and serialized entertainment formats. 

Iconic Arts was founded a few years ago by CEO Steven Haddadian and several partners. The firm has backing from screenwriter Eric Roth, musician and technologist Will.i.am and Hollywood executives Chris Heatherly (Disney, NBC Universal) and Mark Caplan (Sony) among others.  

The studio has a separate joint venture in Japan with lead investor and advisor, Motoki Tani, who was the co-founder of Animoca Brands KK, which advises clients on IP development.  

Studio Arts has a proprietary data intelligence platform known as IP-IQ that’s designed to guide preproduction creative development, audience targeting, platform selection and IP scalability. 

Dentsu said a key focus of the effort is to help Japanese and global brands develop cross-cultural content and other IP that can be used in multiple markets.  

“Iconic Arts and IP-IQ give our teams a powerful way to identify which stories, formats and IP ideas have global potential,” said Ray Konishi, head of Japan-US Synergy at Dentsu.  

Last year, beverage giant Suntory Holdings made a “strategic investment” in Iconic Arts, although the financial details were not disclosed. But the main idea is to explore new marketing and storytelling methods to enhance global brand value, the company said at the time.