Last week I touched grass for the first time in a minute.
I had a baby boy back in March, which is a big part of why, a year ago, I left the entertainment world to build Field Vision. I wanted the flexibility to make my own hours, raise my son, and only take on work that actually scratches my brain. Best decision I’ve ever made. It also means I spend a lot of time at home.
So I have to be deliberate about getting out, meeting people, and keeping a pulse on the culture I work in. My real fear is becoming the walking version of the “hello, fellow kids” meme. In my industry, that is death.
This quarter, I spent that time on some in-person business development and consumer immersion at Fanatics Fest in New York. Now in its third year, it’s a celebration of sports, collectibles, and the thing the name promises: fandom. I walked in to learn more about my clients and the customers we serve. I dictated observations into my phone all week, planning to come home and turn the brain dump into a tidy list of takeaways.
When I sat down with the notes, they all pointed at one idea.
The kidult.
What Is a Kidult?
A kidult is an adult who keeps actively engaging with the interests, brands, and fandoms they loved as a child. Collectibles. Cartoons. Sports cards. Comic books. The stuff we were told to pack away at some milestone and never look at again.
For a few years now, the word has been used as an insult. It describes a sad caricature of a millennial. The emotionally stunted man-child in his mom’s basement, pizza roll crust in his beard, marinara on his game controller. Or the Disney-brained parent who traded a 401(k) for an annual park-hopper pass and only speaks in a Fairy Godmother accent. The moved-home-after-college, never-too-old-for-a-Halloween-costume shell of a “real adult.”
Fanatics Fest didn’t just reframe that for me. It beat it out of me with a 2x4.
The kidult isn’t a degradation of modern responsibility or a developmental defect from bad parenting. It’s a shift. And like most cultural shifts, it’s driven by technology. Specifically, technology that permanently changed how we consume the things we love, from childhood straight through adulthood.
Why the Kidult Is Here to Stay
Our parents mostly grew up loving the same things. Saturday morning cartoons. Stacks of vinyl. Comic books. A signed baseball from one game with their dad.
And then, one day, all of it seemed to vanish. Adulthood and childhood filed for divorce. We were told this was natural, that at a certain age everything you adored as a kid was no longer relevant to your new, serious, responsible self.
There’s a sliver of truth to it. I don’t know many peers still watching Rugrats every morning or sleeping with a baseball card under the pillow. But mostly? It’s a myth. And here’s why.
Back when our parents were young, the technology itself ended things. A cartoon stopped airing and literally disappeared into thin air. Your favorite athlete hung up the cleats and rode off into the sunset, never to be seen again. The cassette came out and your vinyl collection was cooked. Your comics got shoved in a box because you didn’t want your prom date to think you were a dork.
That world is gone. Everything we love now lives somewhere, at any time, through the device in our pocket. No matter how niche the interest, there’s a home for it online. A community of fans. An archive. A brand spinning up fresh ways to monetize it.
That includes our childhood interests. The retired athlete rode off into the sunset too, only this time with a selfie stick, a YouTube channel, and a weekly podcast. The cartoon stopped airing, but an archivist uploaded every episode years ago. The comics get discussed every day on Instagram, where grown adults can nerd out in peace. And when a licensed product drops, hundreds of kidults sprint to the digital storefront for a chance to buy it.
The digital world doesn’t just connect us to other people. It connects us to our past selves. Which means it isn’t really a “past” self at all. It’s just you, on one continuous line.
You can kidult forever. Whenever, wherever. And honestly, is anyone out there arguing the world needs less lighthearted, childlike spirit right now?
What the Kidult Economy Means for Brands
If you’re a brand trying to navigate this, here are the three takeaways I carried off the festival floor. This is the same buying discipline that shapes how we approach sports and collectibles marketing with our clients.
1. Lighten Up
Just because your audience is older and your CEO is a stiff doesn’t mean everything has to be dry, serious, and mature. People want to feel light. Find ways to give them that.
One of the best paths is to tap the rituals of childhood. TikTok gets this. At Fanatics Fest there was a whole crowd of guys like me who grew up using their mom’s index cards, scotch tape, and pens to make their own sports cards. TikTok built the photo booth we could never have dreamed of. The first 500 people through the door got their photo taken, customized their own pro-style card, and had it minted into a protective case. The ten-year-old in me could not resist.
2. Weaponize Utility-Driven Nostalgia
Reaching someone in a moment of deep nostalgia is powerful, even for brands with no natural fandom of their own.
Here’s an example. You know what has almost zero fandom? Insurance. So why would an insurance brand show up at Fanatics Fest? Because they knew thousands of adults on that floor were carrying collectibles with real monetary and sentimental value. By offering specialized advice on protecting those assets, they went from sterile corporation to every collector’s helpful friend in about ten seconds. That’s go-to-market strategy meeting the customer exactly where the emotion already is.
3. Treat the Family as One Segment
We tend to think about audiences in tidy boxes. Parents. Kids. Young adults. The real magic happens at the intersection.
Fanatics Fest was full of shared, multi-generational passion. When a parent’s nostalgia lines up with a child’s current obsession, you unlock one of the most powerful monetization mechanisms in marketing. We’re not all Disney, but it’s worth asking what that overlap looks like for your product. This is the kind of audience thinking that runs through our content and creator marketing work, and it’s exactly where fandom turns into durable revenue.
Why This Is a Fandom Story, Not a Toy Story
I spent a decade-plus building audiences at Amazon Music, Twitch, and Pandora, where I grew Pandora to over 80 million monthly active users. Across all of it, the pattern was the same: the brands that win don’t treat fans like a demographic to interrupt. They treat fandom like an asset to build on.
The kidult is the purest version of that fan. Their attachment doesn’t fade, because the technology that used to force it to fade is gone. That’s the same undercurrent I wrote about in the economics of the creator economy: reach and trust behave differently, and the value hides where the attention is genuine rather than rented. Kidults are attention you don’t have to rent. They already showed up. They already care. The only question is whether your brand positioning gives them a reason to bring you into the thing they already love.
Read the Original Essay
This post is the operator’s version. I wrote the full, more personal take on my Substack, where I unpack what Fanatics Fest taught me about fandom, my son, and why being a kid is worth protecting.
Read it here: The Kidult is Here to Stay →
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a kidult?
A kidult is an adult who keeps actively engaging with the interests, brands, and fandoms they loved as a child, from collectibles and cartoons to sports cards and comic books. The label used to be an insult. It now describes a mainstream shift in how people carry childhood passions into adulthood, driven by technology that keeps those interests available at all times.
Why is the kidult trend here to stay?
Because the technology that used to end childhood interests no longer exists. In the past, a cartoon stopped airing, an athlete retired, or a format died and your fandom disappeared with it. Today every interest lives permanently online: a community, an archive, a creator, and a brand ready to monetize it. The digital world keeps adults connected to their past selves on one continuous line, so fandom no longer has an expiration date.
How should brands market to kidults?
Three moves. First, lighten up, because even older audiences want to feel playful, so tap the rituals of childhood. Second, weaponize utility-driven nostalgia by reaching people in a moment of emotional connection with something they love, even in non-endemic categories. Third, treat the family as one segment, because the strongest monetization happens where a parent’s nostalgia meets a child’s current obsession.
Why is nostalgia marketing effective right now?
Nostalgia reaches people while their emotional guard is down and their attachment is high. When a brand shows up during a moment of genuine fandom, even a category with no fandom of its own can become useful and trusted rather than sterile. Ubiquitous technology means those nostalgic moments are now available, and monetizable, every day rather than only at rare cultural events.
Building a brand that fans actually want to carry with them? Book a strategy call and we’ll map where fandom turns into growth for your business.