Hey there!

If you’re new, welcome. What’s Cooking is our monthly newsletter to ensure you're up-to-date with our latest campaigns, product developments and partnerships.

Things are ramping up at Wildfire Towers with campaigns Maximum Entertainment, Pearl Abyss, Paramount and even Doordash live, heading into a busy Q4.

There’s a lot going on and big changes happening, so I’ll do my best to condense it into one e-mail while you sip your Monday morning coffee!

If you have a brief or question for one of the team, feel free to reply to this email or book in 30 mins with me to catch up.

Thanks & forever onwards,

Logan

We’re thrilled to welcome our new Chief Revenue Officer, Amanda Rubin, who brings 15 years of media experience with nearly a decade of that in gaming advertising to Wildfire.

With an impressive career spanning roles at EA and Enthusiast Gaming, she’s been at the forefront of shaping the narratives around why gaming is such an impactful platform for brands, including growing and leading Enthusiast’s Revenue division from zero. From pioneering intrinsic ads to creating multi-platform activations across gaming’s vast ecosystem, she’s seen firsthand that the heart of gaming lies in its communities.

We’re excited for Amanda to help brands tap into our passionate communities through creative, reward-based offers in and around gaming environments.

Her vision aligns perfectly with Wildfire’s mission to ignite meaningful connections between brands and communities and it’s a pleasure to have her on board, seeing an instant impact from an expert in the field.

Read more in Amanda’s announcement post.

I chatted with Alexander Lee from Digiday about our developments and upcoming priorities around community marketing on Discord, as well as how we see ourselves fitting alongside Discord’s own advertising products: Quests.

As is often the way, only a small snippet about the latter made it into the finished article. Whilst it would be nice to get preferential treatment (who wouldn’t want that), my main comment was around the opportunity for us to complement Discord’s Quests through creative, community-specific amplification.

We’re of course enthusiastic about Discord offering out Quests to game developers and, in the future, brands, as it helps legitimize the platform for any advertising solution, including ours. Multi-faceted campaigns that involve Quests, Activities (aka games on Discord) and community amplification is where I see this going, just like you have on other platforms.

The way I see it is you have two ways to reach an audience on any social platform: through an ad platform or through its content creators. Discord is now building the former, where we’ve been operating on the latter.

The creators on Discord are those with an audience: the community owners. Instead of creating videos, they run events. Instead of creating 3 second viral trends, they moderate conversations.

This is what we are fanatic about and is where we are hedging all our bets. If we can help Discord along the way then even better!

Read the full article below:

Introducing Gamechangers: a podcast about the people innovating in gaming.

Join me, Logan, and guests that include industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and marketers as we dive deep into their stories, the mistakes they made, successes they had and tips they can share to give you a leg up.

Whether you’re a marketer wanting to know more about gaming, or a hardcore gamer eager to understand the business side, Gamechangers provides the insights you need without the usual jargon and sweeping generalisations you’d find on a panel.

Yes, it’s another podcast.

BUT, it is filmed in a legit studio with the people who have been there, done it and have the stories to tell in an informal setting.

I had Paul West of Bitcoin Miner and Krish Jagirdar of Internet Game as the first two episodes where I had a lot of fun chatting and learning more about how they got to where they have and their tips for marketing very different, but also quite similar game studios.

If you’re interested in game development, remote work, marketing games or zombies then these episodes are for you! 😉

I’ll post the first couple of episodes on Linkedin when they’re ready, so stay tuned.

We are beta-testing a self-serve platform for campaign onboarding, where buyers are able to upload their campaign information, budget, targeting and tailored assets for Discord – and away you go matching with communities for campaigns. Nothing would be new in terms of how we go about running campaigns, but it saves the back and forth on community and creative approvals.

We expect this to be fully launched towards the end of the year with live ad previews, more visual guides and more advanced matching with communities so campaigns can be launched quicker and with communities of smaller size, enabling buyers to access the long-tail of communities who currently can’t monetize with us.

If you’re interested in testing this, please let us know and we can discuss further!

We’re also rolling out the ability to see in Spark which games a community has been playing, going beyond our survey data to see audience crossovers. For example, someone in a Fortnite community may be a fan of other games.

If they have told us in our surveys that they play CoD then we already have that data, but we can also see these behaviours in Spark now, making community selection more advanced.

These will all be available in the self-serve dashboard when that’s released too!

If you’ve got an upcoming campaign for which we might be a fit, submit a brief or reply to this email so we can create a tailored proposal for you:

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