As I sat waiting for a very delayed flight back from Cannes, it might be clichéd to say, I felt truly energised.

That’s not from the creative work on display or inspirational talks from loosely affiliated celebrities, though I don’t doubt there were many, but from speaking with senior industry leaders about the vision for Wildfire – or rather – their excitement for our next few years.

Also, there are too many summaries of the week on LinkedIn so I will spare you another.

The job of a CEO in a company of our size is the wildest choose-your-own-adventure game out there, with the opportunity to create and own community media, is insanely exciting. Integrating welcome brand partnerships into conversational communities is the next phase of influencer marketing and we’re well-placed to be the infrastructural layer to this.

I’ll share more on this over the next few weeks and months, but first:

We’re hiring in our sales team in NY as the first dedicated seller outside of Amanda (CRO) and myself. Check out the job post here and let us know if you’re interested or know anyone hungry to hit the ground running!

Logan

We asked our clients what they’d want us to improve and the common theme was: measurement.

So, we are so excited to be joining an elite group of ThisThat’s Gold partners and level up!

We wanted to prove the ROI of Wildfire, going beyond metrics like CPC/CPE/CPA, so we are going to now be offering Natural Exposure Brand Lift on every. single. campaign.

What’s included for all campaigns moving forward at no extra cost to clients:

This high quality of Natural Exposure responses comes from our unique way of marketing, as we don’t need to retarget users or force them to watch an ad and take a survey straight after.

How?

Working it into the messaging of a campaign.

A community manager dropping the survey link before a campaign works wonders to generate hype in an authentic way, and gets people ready for what's about to come.

For a recent campaign below, we saw thousands of non-incentivised survey responses in a matter of days from FL Studio's community.

With this quality of response, we're able to dive deep into insights to fuel your next Wildfire campaign, or other media buying.

Measurement matters, and when it’s built into the culture of the community, the results speak for themselves.

This is overall a huge step for us in standardising community media and owning the insight layer, and our clients will benefit from more data points, insights and good old slides to prove ROI 😀

Our engine just got smarter, and not just because of the Brand Lift partnership.

Our AI uses the latest state-of-the-art models to prioritise communities based on:

This has improved which communities are notified of a campaign, and gives rise to additional valuable audiences we might not have received in a brief, particularly around past campaign data.

It is not immediately obvious, even for a highly engaged community that seems like a good fit, which communities will perform well for a given campaign.

But thanks to the hundreds of campaigns we have run, we’re uniquely placed to be able to cycle through the available data and select the most relevant communities for a brief.

TLDR: our internal planning engine is getting some shiny new parts, being fuelled by all our learnings and community partners!

You probably saw the success of “Grow a Garden” and this might well be bigger…

The developer’s Discord server with almost 1 million members in, and it isn’t even out yet. The numbers, and engagement, of Roblox communities is truly staggering and it’s not surprising given it is reportedly 6 years in the making.

Even better, we’re offering out a sponsorship opportunity across the game’s community and upcoming site – this is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of members. Get in touch if this is interesting and we can keep you in the loop as this develops.

You heard it here first (unless you are one of the millions already engaged)!

Here’s some recent feedback from a few communities we work with:

🔥 “I have full trust in you guys. I usually don’t allow people to get involved as heavily in the logistical side of the server, but you’ve been really transparent - I hope we can continue to work together for a while.”

🔥 “The experience with your team thus far has been amazing.”

🔥 “I’ve loved working with Wildfire - especially recently. For the past few campaigns, you’ve not only been punctual but also direct. I really appreciate that.”

I’ve also launched my own founder newsletter that goes back in time and behind the scenes as a mix of stories and tips that I have learned along the way that might help or be interesting 👇

Get in touch! Just reply to this email or click below to start your next campaign with us to get inside the conversation:

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Onwards!