A note from John DeTitta
In the summer of 2002, I sat down and wrote a screenplay. It was 150 pages, based on things I’d lived through as an entrepreneur, and I believed in it enough to take it straight to some of the industry’s top producers. It worked. I walked away with $5 million in financial commitments to get it made.
Then life did what life does. My daughter needed me, and I stepped away from the project to be with her. The screenplay didn’t die, though. It was rewritten, developed by others, and eventually became a film. I’ve watched from the outside as that story reached audiences I never expected it to reach.
That experience taught me something I couldn’t unlearn: even when a project is fully funded, even when the commitments are real, an artist’s place in it can still slip away. The money moves. The control doesn’t always move with the person who created the thing worth funding in the first place.
From a Problem to a Patent
I couldn’t shake the question that came out of that experience: what would it look like if funding worked differently? What if artists didn’t have to choose between financial support and creative ownership?
I started building an answer. Over the next two decades, that answer became patented technology, filed originally in 2004, describing a way for advertisers to fund creative and charitable projects directly, with the resulting revenue flowing into a project fund instead of depending on donations or outside investors pulling the strings.
It’s the same idea I keep coming back to across everything I do, whether I’m producing a film, arranging a piece of music, or writing code: build something that helps people, and make sure it can sustain itself financially. One without the other doesn’t last.
FeedTheArts.com
FeedTheArts.com is that idea, built specifically for artists.
The program provides direct grants, funded through advertising revenue rather than donations or investment. That distinction matters to me. Donations depend on someone else’s generosity in the moment. Investment usually comes with strings, and sometimes with a seat at the table you didn’t invite. Advertising revenue is different. It’s money already moving through the system, and FeedTheArts is designed to redirect a piece of it straight to the people making the work.
We’re opening after October 20, 2026, starting with an initial round of grants. I built this to grow, not to be a one-time gesture, so this first round is a starting point, not the whole story.
Who This Is For
If you’re an artist who has ever had a project ready and no clear way to fund it, this is for you. If you’re an advertiser who wants your spending to do more than buy an impression, I’d like to talk to you too.
I’ve spent more time than I can count trying to solve this problem for myself. FeedTheArts is what I’ve built for everyone facing the same one.
Visit FeedTheArts.com to learn more, and follow along as we open applications for our first round of grants.
About the Author
