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Tracking IP Opportunities: Create a Feed That Alerts You When Agencies Sign New Properties

ffeedroad

2026-02-02

11 min read

Build an RSS → Zapier → Notion feed to catch agency signings and transmedia deals fast — get alerts, triage, and pitch before the window closes.

Stop missing deals: a lightweight feed that alerts you when agencies sign new properties

Creators, producers and IP scouts — if you're juggling multiple feeds, Twitter (X) noise, and the slow drip of newsletters, you know the worst problem: by the time you hear an agency signed a promising IP, someone else already owns the outreach window. In 2026 the speed of dealflow matters more than ever — boutique transmedia studios are surfacing fast, agencies are signing international IP, and early alerts win first-look conversations.

This tutorial walks you through building a practical, low-cost aggregator that converts scattered reporting (news sites, trade pages, agency announcements) into near-realtime alerts in Notion using RSS + Zapier. You'll get a repeatable workflow for tracking agency signings (WME, CAA, UTA and boutiques), studio deals, and transmedia opportunities so you can pitch, partner or option early.

Why this matters in 2026: trends shaping opportunity scouting

Boutique transmedia studios and creator-owned IP exploded in late 2024–2025; agencies now proactively sign smaller IP houses to package multi-format rights.
News distribution fragmented: large outlets and trade sites split paywalls, APIs were limited in 2025, and social APIs tightened, so feeds + lightweight scraping are back in vogue.
Automation + AI summarization let you process more leads: by 2026 it's feasible to auto-extract rights, territories and contact cues from articles before human review.
First-mover advantage is bigger: agencies sign a property, and outreach windows close within days. Automated alerts give you hours instead of days.

“When The Orangery signed with WME in Jan 2026, creators who had automated alerts were already in outreach mode within hours.”

Overview: what you'll build

In this tutorial you will build an end-to-end pipeline that:

Collects signals from targeted news sources and social pages as RSS feeds (including generated feeds where none exist).
Filters and enriches items with Zapier (keyword filters, AI summarization, entity extraction).
Creates structured records in a Notion database and sends alerts (Slack/email) for high-priority items.

Step 1 — Identify high-quality sources

Start with a small list of trade and niche feeds that regularly report representation and studio deals. Prioritize these types:

Major trades: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline.
Agency news pages and press rooms: WME, CAA, UTA, ICM Partners, boutique agencies and European houses (like The Orangery coverage).
IP/studio blogs and rights marketplaces.
Local trade pages and specialist blogs for genre IP (comics, graphic novels, podcasts, games).

Note: in 2026, some outlets restrict API or paywall their feeds. Don't panic — you can create reliable feeds from search results, author pages and tag pages, or use public tools like RSSHub, FetchRSS or Feed43 to generate feeds from HTML pages.

Quick source checklist

Does the site have a native RSS? (check the page source for /feed or /rss)
Is there a tag or author page for “agency” / “signed” / “representation”?
Can RSSHub produce a feed for that page? (rsshub.app host often supports trades and X user feeds)
Fallback: build a Google/Bing News search feed or use a light scraper to produce RSS.

Step 2 — Create normalized RSS feeds

Feeds are the standard signal format that Zapier's RSS trigger can consume. Aim for normalized feeds (one item per article) and tag-heavy item titles.

Options to create feeds

Native RSS: use whenever available — it's reliable and preserves metadata.
RSSHub: open-source route for X, Twitter lists, author pages and some sites. In 2026 RSSHub remains one of the most flexible tools for creating missing feeds.
FetchRSS / Feed43: visual feed builders for sites without feeds. Good for search-results pages, agency newsrooms or press release archives.
Bing News / SerpAPI: use an API to run queries (e.g., agency names + “signed” or “represents”) and convert results to an RSS output using a small serverless function if needed.

Example feed ideas (start with these):

Variety agency tag / author feed
Deadline studio deals feed
Agency pressrooms: WME press releases
RSSHub feed for a Twitter/X list of agents and agency handles

Step 3 — Build the Zapier pipeline

We'll create a Zap with three core stages: Trigger (RSS), Filter/Enrich (Zapier Formatter + AI), and Action (Notion + Slack/email).

Zap outline

Trigger: RSS by Zapier — New Item in Feed
Action: Filter by Zapier — include keywords like: signed, signs with, inked, represented by, optioned, packaged, WME, CAA, UTA, studio, transmedia
Action: Formatter / Code — parse the title and body to extract agency names and IP names (simple regex or JavaScript in Code by Zapier)
Action (optional but recommended): OpenAI (or Zapier AI) — summarize the article into a 1-2 sentence blurb and extract structured fields (IP title, rights mentioned, territory, contact cues)
Action: Notion — Create Database Item — populate a Notion DB with properties and store the full URL and summary.
Action(s): Slack message or Email for immediate alerts if priority is high (use a conditional path).

Zapier filter — sample keyword rule

Use the filter step to reduce noise. Example expression (Zapier supports boolean matching):

Title contains: "signs with" OR "signed with" OR "represented by" OR "inked a deal" OR "optioned" OR "packaged"

Add a second filter for agency names to capture agency-first announcements:

Content contains: "WME" OR "CAA" OR "UTA" OR "William Morris" OR "Creative Artists Agency" OR "The Orangery"

Enrichment with AI

Use an AI step to extract three discrete fields: IP name, agency/studio, and signal strength (e.g., press release vs. rumor). Prompt example:

Summarize this article in 25 words and extract: 1) IP name(s); 2) Agency or studio; 3) Whether it's confirmed (press release/agency tweet) or reported (trade coverage).

In 2026, Zapier has built-in LLM actions, or you can use OpenAI via Zapier. This step gives you structured properties for Notion and lets you triage automatically.

Step 4 — Notion setup: a database tuned for opportunity scouting

Create a Notion database with these fields — make them properties so you can filter, sort and create views:

Title (Article title / IP name)
Source (Variety, Deadline, agency site)
Link (URL)
Agency / Studio (multi-select)
IP (text)
Signal Type (Press release / Trade report / Tweet / Rumor)
Territory / Rights (text / multi-select)
Priority (Low / Medium / High)
Status (New / Contacted / Not Interested / In Discussion)
Assigned to (person)
Summary (text from AI)
Date (article date)

Design views for quick action: Today’s Alerts, High Priority, and Unreviewed. Use Notion templates for outreach so you can populate pitch emails quickly from the record.

Step 5 — Triage, outreach and scoring

Automation surfaces leads, but human context wins deals. Build a lightweight triage routine:

Scan the Notion "Unreviewed" view each morning — open items flagged High Priority.
Use the summary and source link to determine: is this a confirmed signing, a rumor, or a secondary report? Prioritize confirmed press releases and agency announcements.
Enrich with contact discovery: check LinkedIn, agency staff pages and company press kits. Add contacts to the Notion record.
Use outreach templates in Notion and log outreach attempts directly in the database — pair templates with a checklist informed by creative automation playbooks to scale personalization.
Measure: track response rate and time-to-contact to improve the feed filters and scoring rules over time.

Advanced filters, deduping and scoring

As your volume grows you'll need rules to surface the highest-value items.

Dedupe: Use a digest or unique ID step (hash of title + link) to ignore repeat syndications. Zapier can check Notion for an existing URL before creating a new item.
Score: build a numeric score from signals: agency prominence (WME/CAA/UTA = +3), confirmed press release = +2, IP with proven sales (e.g., bestseller/comic hit) = +2, transmedia mention (podcast/comic/game) = +1.
High-priority routes: if score >= X, send Slack ping to #opportunities channel and create a calendar reminder to follow up within 24 hours.

Practical Zap examples and snippets

Below are two small patterns you can paste into a Code by Zapier step (JavaScript) to extract an agency name and IP title from a simplified title string. Tweak to match your sources.

// Example: parse title like 'Transmedia IP Studio the Orangery ... Signs With WME'
  const title = inputData.title || '';
  const agencyMatch = title.match(/Signs With (.+)$/i) || title.match(/Signs With (.+?)\b/i);
  const agency = agencyMatch ? agencyMatch[1].trim() : '';
  const ipMatch = title.match(/Transmedia IP Studio (.+?)\s*,/i) || title.match(/Behind Hit (.+?) Series/i);
  const ip = ipMatch ? ipMatch[1].trim() : '';
  return {agency, ip};

Use Zapier’s search step to check Notion for existing URL before creating a new record — that prevents duplicates.

Privacy, legal and ethical considerations

You're aggregating published public reporting — that’s generally fine. But be mindful of:

Paywalled content: respect terms of service for scraping or feed generation.
Private data: don’t scrape contact info from private pages or abuse platform rate limits.
Transparency: when you reach out to an agency or rights holder, be transparent about your interest and prior work.

Case study: how an automated feed wins a pitch (hypothetical, based on real patterns)

Imagine a boutique European transmedia studio signs with a major agency (like the Jan 2026 WME + The Orangery example covered by trades). Your feed picks up the Variety article within minutes via an RSSHub feed. Zapier filters it as “High priority” because it matches agency names and the phrase “signs with.” The AI step extracts "the Orangery" as IP holder and marks the signal as confirmed. Notion creates a High Priority card and Slack pings your A&R channel with a one-line summary and link.

Your producer checks the Notion record, finds that the IP has a graphic novel hit and a European rights profile. Within three hours you’ve sent a tailored email offering a pitch deck and a creative roadmap for a limited series. Because you were fast and targeted, you get a response to set a call — you’re now in the conversation other creators missed.

Maintenance and scaling

Keep the pipeline nimble:

Review feed performance monthly. Drop noisy sources; add niche sites where deals appear.
Tune filters based on false positives (too many rumor articles) and false negatives (missed agency-only pressrooms).
Consider moving enrichment off Zapier to a serverless function if volume grows — this reduces costs and gives more control for advanced NLP.
Track KPIs: opportunities captured/month, outreach conversion, time-to-first-contact.

Templates: outreach subject lines and quick pitch scripts

Use these templates in Notion to speed follow-up.

Subject — Quick intro re: [IP name] — potential adaptation partner
Email body — Short: 1) reference the announcement; 2) 1-sentence value offer (track record, audience size or creative hook); 3) ask for a 15-minute call and provide availability.

Measuring success

Quantify the system's impact. Track these metrics in Notion or a simple spreadsheet:

Alerts received per month
Items reviewed vs. auto-filtered
Outreach attempts spawned from alerts
Responses and meetings booked
Deals progressed (NDAs, option letters, collaborations)

Future proofing: where opportunity scouting is headed

Looking ahead in 2026–2027, expect:

More structured deal metadata in trade feeds as outlets standardize reporting for IP and rights.
Better feed interoperability with ActivityPub-like protocols adopted by niche publishers — easier to subscribe to creator-focused channels.
AI-first enrichment becoming standard: you’ll see automated extraction of rights, format interest (TV, film, podcast), and suggested intro templates generated from your pitch history.

Checklist: launch this in a weekend

Pick 6–10 source pages (trades + agency pressrooms).
Create or validate RSS for each (native or RSSHub/FetchRSS).
Build a Zap: RSS trigger → Filter → AI extract → Notion create → Slack/email alert.
Design Notion DB and two views: Unreviewed and High Priority.
Create 3 outreach templates in Notion and test sending one manual outreach within 24 hours of your first alert.
Measure first-month KPIs and refine keywords.

Final tips from the field

Start narrow. It’s better to have a small, high-quality feed than a firehose of false positives.
Use agency name lists and synonyms to capture variations (e.g., "WME", "William Morris Endeavor").
Log everything in Notion — the audit trail teaches you which signals convert.
Combine automation with human judgment: the fastest tech still loses to the smartest pitch.

Actionable takeaways

Build feeds from trade tag pages and agency pressrooms using RSSHub or FetchRSS.
Filter early in Zapier using tight keyword rules to cut noise.
Enrich automatically with AI to extract IP, agency and signal type for fast triage.
Store structured leads in Notion with templates and views for rapid outreach.

Call to action

Ready to stop missing deals? Start today: pick three sources, spin up RSS feeds with RSSHub or FetchRSS, and create your first Zap to push items into a Notion database. If you'd like, I can provide a downloadable Zap blueprint and a Notion database template tailored for transmedia and agency-signing signals — tell me which agencies and genres you care about and I’ll generate a starter config you can import.

feedroad

Contributor

Senior editor and content strategist. Writing about technology, design, and the future of digital media. Follow along for deep dives into the industry's moving parts.