Advertising campaigns generate attention that stops the moment the campaign ends. More and more brands are now redirecting part of that budget toward assets whose value keeps compounding long after the campaign wraps up.
Every marketing team has faced the same problem. The campaign budget shrinks, the performance report closes out with satisfying numbers, and a few months later the team is back to planning the next launch. Much of the attention built through the previous campaign has to be fought for all over again, because the momentum and the conversation it sparked have already faded.
This pattern used to make sense. Media channels were more limited, the cost of capturing attention was relatively low, and repurchasing attention every year was still considered efficient.
Over time, though, conditions changed. The cost of capturing attention keeps climbing, the number of channels keeps multiplying, and the lifespan of any given ad message keeps shrinking. As the cost of grabbing attention rises while its impact fades ever faster, more brands are starting to ask whether their entire marketing budget still needs to be poured into something so temporary.
Some brands have begun responding to this shift by moving part of their budget toward something with a longer lifespan. Rather than continuing to rely on campaigns, they are building characters, stories, events, and communities that can be used again and again for years. This practice is known as building intellectual property (IP). In this article, IP is not discussed in its legal sense — copyright or patents — but as a creative asset that a brand owns and continues to develop, whether in the form of a character, a story, a community, an event, or an experience that keeps bringing consumers back.
Djarum doesn't sell badminton training, Surya doesn't sell a music festival, and Eiger doesn't sell a community of hikers. Yet all three have invested resources in building assets that stay alive even after the ad campaign is over. These three examples show that more and more brands are no longer just selling products — they are building worlds that live on through intellectual property.
This phenomenon isn't confined to global brand strategy; it's also starting to be reflected in the direction of Indonesia's creative economy. In 2024, the creative economy contributed Rp1,611.2 trillion, or 7.28 percent of national GDP (BPS, 2025). At the same time, the government has also begun pushing the commercialization of intellectual property as one of its national strategic programs. For marketers, the relevant signal in these numbers is simple: work that can be owned and continuously developed is increasingly seen as an economic asset, not just campaign material.
That's where the core shift lies. Branding strategy is moving from campaign-driven to asset-driven. Brands are no longer just buying attention through campaigns — they're starting to build assets that can keep generating attention and value over the long term.
Not Every Brand Needs to Build IP from Scratch
Shifting toward an asset-based strategy doesn't mean every brand has to create its own intellectual property (IP). In practice, companies have several options for leveraging IP depending on their business goals, resources, and investment horizon. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches most commonly used.
First, building your own IP (build own IP). This strategy involves creating assets that are fully owned and developed by the brand — characters, communities, loyalty programs, events, or experience platforms. This approach requires a larger investment of time and money upfront, but it grants full control over how the asset develops and opens up long-term monetization opportunities through licensing, collaborations, and spin-off activities. In Indonesia, this approach can be seen in EIGER Adventure Club and Suryanation, both of which have grown into brand identities that extend beyond their core products.
Second, acquiring existing IP (acquire IP). Rather than building from the ground up, some companies choose to buy IP that already has its own fan base and ecosystem. This strategy is more common among large corporations, since it requires significant investment, but it can drastically cut the time needed to build awareness. Disney's acquisitions of Marvel and Lucasfilm are prime examples of how a company can expand its portfolio of creative assets by acquiring already-established IP.
Third, collaborating with IP owned by other parties (tap existing IP). In this strategy, the brand doesn't own the asset — instead, it works together through licensing or partnership. The goal isn't to build new IP, but to tap into the emotional connection that IP already has with its audience. In Indonesia, this can be seen in Garuda Indonesia's collaboration with Tahilalats, as well as the partnerships between Traveloka and Gojek as sponsors of Liga 1. For many brands, this strategy offers a faster, lower-risk way to capture attention compared to building IP from scratch.
In practice, this kind of collaboration can span a much wider spectrum. Beyond licensing for short-term campaigns or collaborations, there are also long-term licensing arrangements that grant management and business development rights over an IP without transferring ownership. One example is IDN's management of JKT48, where IDN holds the license and management rights to develop JKT48 in Indonesia, while ownership of the IP itself remains with the rights holder in Japan.
The choice among these three strategies depends on what the brand is trying to achieve. Brands pursuing long-term differentiation tend to benefit more from building their own assets. Conversely, when the main goal is to accelerate awareness or support a short-term campaign, partnering with an already-established IP is often the more efficient choice.
Brand Assets Have a Lifespan, Campaigns Have a Run Time
Many people assume intellectual property is synonymous with mascots or fictional characters. In a branding context, however, IP can take a much broader range of forms: communities, event formats, experiences, even the cultural meaning attached to a brand. What sets these apart isn't their form, but their ability to keep generating value after a campaign has ended. The key difference between a campaign and an asset lies in what's left once the budget runs out. A campaign leaves behind a performance report. An asset leaves behind something that can still be used for the next launch.
Eiger demonstrates this kind of asset without a single fictional character. The Bandung-based outdoor brand runs EIGER Adventure Club as a membership program complete with points, exclusive benefits, and invitations to community gatherings (EIGER Adventure, 2026). Its EISCC climbing competition has run through its 2025 edition, rooted in a climbing wall the company built on Jalan Cihampelas back in 1993 (EIGER Adventure, 2025b). Adventure Fest 2025 ran for a full week, featuring community discussion zones and involving other outdoor brands (EIGER Adventure, 2025a), while its newest flagship store was also designed as a gathering point for the outdoor community (EIGER Adventure, 2025c).
What makes this string of initiatives relevant for marketers is its cost structure. Each edition of EISCC builds on the name, format, and participant base already established by the previous one, so Eiger doesn't need to rebuild the reason people show up each time. A campaign with an equivalent budget would generate greater reach within four weeks, then stop entirely by week five. That comparison is what shifts the math: a brand asset may look more expensive in its first year, but its value keeps compounding every time it's reused. A campaign, by contrast, has to buy attention from zero every time it launches.
If Tahilalats shows how IP can be deliberately built, Indomie shows that a brand asset can also grow through cultural meaning formed over the long term. With a production capacity of tens of billions of packets a year and distribution to more than 100 countries, the brand has become a marker of identity for much of the Indonesian diaspora. Its presence isn't limited to retail shelves — it also shows up at cultural events, campus orientations, and the countless fusion recipes that circulate on social media (Seasia, 2025).
While Indomie still runs large-scale marketing activities, its position as a cultural icon has been built through an accumulation of experiences, conversations, and ongoing local adaptation. For marketers, the real lesson here isn't simply the size of a brand's reach, but how a brand can keep gaining new meaning long after its campaign's run time has ended.
Both examples push back against the most common stigma around IP — the assumption that a brand asset has to be a cute character. The assets in question can take the form of an event format, a community program, a physical space, or even cultural meaning. What matters is how long that asset stays useful after the budget is gone, with design appeal as a secondary factor. A similar question comes up when a brand builds an identity that stays alive on other channels even as its direct campaign wraps up, as seen in the practice of [surrogate marketing]. The difference is that IP turns that identity into a standalone asset.
Build Your Own, or Tap Into Existing IP?
Once you understand that IP is a long-term asset, the next question for marketers isn't whether IP is worth pursuing, but which strategy fits best. Not every company needs to build its own IP. In practice, many brands actually get more efficient results by collaborating with IP that already has an established fan base.
Each approach carries different consequences — in terms of cost, time, and the level of control a brand has over the asset being built.
A visual on the guidelines and key considerations before building your own IP for a creative work or business.
What to consider before building your own IP
The build-your-own-IP strategy can be seen in LEGO. For decades, the company hasn't just sold toys — it has built out an entire story universe spanning films, series, video games, theme parks, and original characters like Ninjago. The value LEGO holds today wasn't built through a single campaign, but through an accumulated ecosystem and experience that has kept growing for years.
Garuda Indonesia, by contrast, shows a different approach. Rather than building its own character, the airline chose to collaborate with Tahilalats through its Sky Explorer campaign. This kind of strategy lets a brand tap into the emotional connection an IP already has, without having to invest years building that connection from scratch.
Neither approach is categorically better than the other. Brands with a long investment horizon can gain significant benefits from building their own assets, but the trade-off is the ongoing need to keep developing that IP to stay relevant. Partnering with an already-established IP, on the other hand, lets a brand capture attention faster, though its long-term benefits are limited since the asset remains owned by someone else.
In other words, the biggest cost in building IP isn't in the launch — it's in the ongoing commitment to keep developing that asset so it stays relevant.
Challenges of Building Intellectual Property
Building IP is often seen as a long-term investment, but the strategy also carries a number of challenges worth considering before a brand commits its budget to it.
An illustration on the challenges of creating your own IP, with a title over a colored graphic background.
Challenges of building IP
The biggest challenge in building IP isn't the launch process — it's the ability to sustain its relevance over the long haul. An asset that's no longer developed will lose its value, the same way a campaign fades once its run time is over. Because of this, the decision to build IP shouldn't just weigh the launch budget, but also whether the organization is ready to manage and develop that asset for years to come.
Closing
The shift toward an IP-based strategy doesn't mean every brand needs to build its own IP. For companies with a long-term vision, a strong community, and the resources to keep developing their assets, IP can become an investment that generates recurring value through multiple touchpoints, collaborations, and new business opportunities. But for brands chasing short-term results or working with limited resources, partnering with an already-established IP is often the more efficient choice.
Ultimately, the decision to build or leverage IP isn't just a matter of creativity — it's a business decision. Brands need to weigh their marketing goals, investment horizon, asset-management capacity, and long-term monetization potential before settling on a strategy.
As the cost of capturing attention keeps rising and campaign lifespans keep shrinking, the more relevant question for marketers is no longer whether to use intellectual property, but when to build IP of their own and when it's better to tap into IP that already exists.
References
(Reference-list entries are conventionally left untranslated, since they cite the actual titles of the original Indonesian-language sources.)
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