Major Hollywood studios aren’t the only ones investing in content creator IP.
Back in 2024, Lenovo and digital media studio Portal A decided to do something different to advertise the brand’s line of Yoga hinged-screen laptops. In the wake of the COVID-time content boom, brands were tapping creators for more and more campaigns–but Lenovo and Portal A didn’t want to do a campaign.
At least, not a typical campaign.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Instead, their goal was to build a long-term, creator-driven IP that also happens to be a marketing vehicle for Lenovo’s AI-heavy hard- and software. And to accomplish that, they wanted to bring in creators not just as spokespeople and endorsers, but as creative directors.
The result: Creator Odyssey, which is at its core a challenge that calls on artists from around the world to make projects using Lenovo’s tech–and to document the process in videos and social posts.
Lenovo and Portal A picked longtime friends and collaborators Gawx and Vexx–both of whom are professional artists and YouTubers–to lead the project. In the initial 2024 installment of Creator Odyssey, Gawx filmed an initial video that served as a rallying cry for six fellow participating artists. Further videos followed a Lenovo laptop around the world to the different artists, showing off how a single product could be used by artists across mediums.
Nine YouTube videos and 143 social posts later, Creator Odyssey racked up 400K watch hours, 946K engagements, and 19.6M views, Lenovo says.
So it and Portal A decided to invest further. Another installment of Creator Odyssey dropped in 2025, and the third iteration, World Stage, dropped last month, themed and timed for Lenovo’s partnership with FIFA World Cup 2026.
World Stage again tapped in Gawx and Vexx, with Lenovo deeming them the “Visionaries” responsible for World Stage’s creative direction. To keep in theme, participating artists were matched with various sports pros “to explore the similarities between artists and athletes,” Lenovo and Portal A say.
Those artists included Gawx and Vexx themselves, along with Norwegian filmmaker Maria Kallevik, Indian VFX specialist Shutter Authority, Australian graphic designer Elliotisacoolguy, Norwegian VFX artist Erik Does VFX, and American Isaac Carlton, self-dubbed maker of “little movies.” Each completed their projects at home (again, using Lenovo tech), then traveled to Mexico City for a group unveiling.
World Stage clocked in with eight YouTube videos and more than 90 social posts, which grabbed Lenovo 400K+ watch hours, 367K+ engagements, and 25.6M+ views.
Alia Rosmini, Lenovo’s Executive Director, Consumer Marketing, Global, tells Tubefilter it wanted to build Creator Odyssey because “we wanted ot get really serious about our presence and how we can help creators.”
“I’ve always been an admirer of creators. They really are the most influential storytellers,” Rosmini, who spent 19 years at HP before joining Lenovo in 2021, says. “We wanted to be super authentic about how we engaged and really celebrate and showcase how technology can help with the process of creation.”
She says it would be “easy” for a brand to do “relatively one-dimensional campaigns, but we wanted to go much deeper into it.”
That’s why, outside of the three Creator Odyssey installments, Lenovo launched a 24/7, 365 platform called the Lenovo Creator Community. There, artists, writers, musicians, and more can access forum-style conversation spaces, plus resources and a list of applications for upcoming “gigs” Lenovo describes as “[e]xclusive creator opportunities to work with Lenovo and our partners.”
All of this is part of Lenovo leaning into creators as creative directors, Rosmini says.
For Creator Odyssey, “we enable the resources and technology, but it’s absolutely the creator’s vision and their execution,” she says. “We don’t want to stifle creativity. We want to celebrate it, and the products are part of that process of enablement.”
For the World Stage installment–where Lenovo is FIFA’s first official technology partner–Lenovo and Portal A saw a chance to build creative marketing around “one of the largest, most globally connected events in the world,” she adds. “It brings everyone together, and our partnership with FIFA is very deep.”
Matching artists and athletes was a natural fit because “the World Cup is one of those moments where it really excites passion,” Rosmini says. “We saw this synergy for what passion really means, and how that’s the fuel behind creators. With the World Cup, we see how communities celebrate, and a lot of that celebration is represented in art and design and cultural expression. It inspires creativity beyond the pitch, and it was just such a wonderful way to tie the two things together.”
While the short-term benefit is getting the word out about Lenovo’s products, building Creator Odyssey into an ongoing IP and a year-round platform also benefits Lenovo in the long-term, Rosmini says.
“By getting that much closer to the creator community, we see product design elements for future products,” she explains. “Our creators feed back to us all the time. It’s a great way for us to get real insight that helps shape the future of our product portfolio.”
