My take on AI Scale – we’re forgetting about the market

We’re all grappling with the same mess of existential dread. Job replacement, cyber warfare, artificial general intelligence, economic meltdown – there’s a mess of new problems that inevitably will come to pass if AI continues to scale in capability and agency. If you’re like me, you’ve sunk down the rabbit hole of anxiety about where this all leads.

To grapple with these anxieties, I’ve recently started going for daily walks in my neighborhood, where I engage in the joys of analog things. On one of my recent walks, it occurred to me that while I do believe that the technology itself has astronomical potential, there is a distinct difference between what this technology CAN DO, and what users will PAY FOR IT TO DO.

The level of investment that we’re seeing dumped into AI doesn’t come from investors that believe in the power of AI to derail capitalism (ICYMI - Elon told The Economist that he believes that money will become irrelevant by 2036). It comes from investors who believe they’re going to make more money than anything they’ve ever bet on before in their lives. 

In order for these investors to see the kinds of returns they’re expecting from the AI race however, we need to remember that not all users will pay infinitely for all tasks to become automated by AI. There will be diminishing returns on where AI is worth the cost, and where they will need to continue to rely on human labor. We haven’t hit the line yet, and therefore the ambiguity as to where this line lies, across different industries and consumer markets, is what’s causing panic in the labor market.

As different markets find this line for themselves, we’ll begin to truly understand what the actual financial return will be for AI, and where marginal gains to productivity can truly be found. This is clearer in some markets than others, as Anthropic has already begun to predict – and as we see AI begin to be paired with supplementary technologies like robotics, this AI coverage will begin to expand.

Read: Anthropic - Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

But this prediction really only covers AI capability, it hasn’t tested what industries and markets will pay for, and where that demand will stick as cost increases. It’s tempting to assume that all industries will want to automate entirely, but without understanding the nuances of their businesses, and the many variables involved, this becomes a risky assumption. Consider such variables as data privacy restrictions, which could impact industries like Healthcare and Legal, or consumer market preferences, which could impact the Arts & Media industry if, for example, we saw users push back on AI-generated films and music. These aren’t trivial, and they’re not problems that you can simply ask the AI to solve around. They require policy changes, or massive power over consumer demand, that not all firms possess.

We’re already seeing consumer AI usage behavior change and respond to competitive pressure. ChatGPT once considered itself the standard bearer and proof point for where user adoption of AI was trending, but as usage stats have begun to slow, we’re now beginning to see that the market is sticking to where they can get the best product value, for the best price. 

Anthropic and Google are taking great advantage of this. Anthropic was slower to market with Claude Code, but introduced it when it offered a truly differentiating power that has absolutely transformed the software engineering market in a historical way. Instead of chasing the consumer adoption trend, they waited to introduce something that enterprise businesses now can no longer afford to live without. That means - they’ll pay for it.

Meanwhile, for standard consumers, Gemini offers similar features as ChatGPT that existing Google Suite users don’t need to pay extra for, unless they want premium features. This allows them to leverage AI as a Google Suite product value deal sweetener that strengthens their user base adoption and preserves their audience size.

As economic pressures become tighter in 2026, users will all begin asking themselves – can I really afford to pay for a premium AI chatbot? Do I really need to pay for these features? Once that mirage of differentiated product value begins to evaporate, so too will our imagined revenue gains from AI. 

This is why the B2B / Enterprise play for AI adoption is the shining light for revenue growth – Anthropic learned this well with Claude Code, and it’s why they’re thinking critically about where AI implementation can inflect the right businesses critically (Read about their partnership with Blackstone to launch Ode). Finding those inflection points is critical to preserving lasting revenue gains from AI.

Meta Quest App Store: End-to-End Platform Strategy for a Content Catalog that you had to feel to believe

THE CHALLENGE: SELLING AN EXPERIENCE YOU REALLY CAN'T JUST SHOW ON A SHELF

Every storefront has the same job: connect the right person to the right product at the moment they're ready to buy. The Meta Quest App Store had to do that job under a uniquely hard constraint — the thing we were selling could not be experienced until after the purchase.

You cannot feel six-degrees-of-freedom presence from a static tile. You cannot convey the physical joy of Beat Saber, or the survival-horror dread of Resident Evil 4, through a thumbnail and a price. And yet the store itself was exactly that: a scrollable, panelized wall of app tiles, sitting on top of a catalog that was growing into the thousands as the platform opened up. The signal-to-noise problem was getting worse every month. And the medium's greatest asset — immersion — was invisible at the exact surface where purchase decisions got made.

However, I realized that we couldn’t just come up with silo’ed tactics to introduce immersion into our storefront panel. We needed to think about conveying the magic of VR immersion across an entire end-to-end commerce system. A storefront only works when three things move in sync: a UX that brings order to the catalog and earns the first click, an editorial voice that carries the user through consideration, super low friction through checkout, and a content supply chain that keeps great, well-merchandised inventory flowing in. Break any one of the three and the whole funnel leaks.

PILLAR 1 — UX DESIGN: BRINGING ORDER TO THE CATALOG, AND EARNING THE CLICK

The first job was organizational. Thousands of apps, one scrollable panel, and a user with no way to preview the product. I approached the storefront UX as a funnel with two distinct jobs at two distinct depths.

At the catalog level, the work was about visual order and ranking. This is where we needed to get super sharp in our content Merchandising strategy. We developed a store-ranking framework that was flexible enough to understand what the user wanted, and learn from the market as more users interacted with it. This created an insight feedback loop that helped our Merchandisers create new shelving and collection types that reacted to what users were engaging with, right now.
We also learned to break apart the repeated pattern blindness in our UX and build new browse units and landing surfaces that gave the catalog a new and exciting structure that felt dynamic and alive, instead of an undifferentiated wall. 

At the product-detail level (the PDP), the job changed entirely. Once a user clicked, we needed to hand them the controls. We thought of the PDP as a "choose your own adventure" — a self-directed consideration experience where the user could pull the exact evidence they needed to decide whether this app was right for them: trailers to feel the gameplay, structured PDP detail to answer practical questions, and immersive takeovers that broke the app out of the flat panel and let the medium finally speak for itself. Different buyers need different proof; the PDP had to let each one assemble their own path to conviction. 

UX brought order to the catalog and drove the click. But a click is not conviction — and that's where most VR buyers got stuck.

PILLAR 2 — EDITORIAL STRATEGY: GIVING THE STORE A VOICE OF AUTHORITY

UX could organize information and get a user to lean in. It could not tell them whether a game was actually good. That's a mid-funnel problem, and it's where consideration stalls: the user is interested, but not yet convinced, and a spec sheet won't move them.

The answer was to give the store a voice. Through editorial programming — curation, collections, and a point of view about what was worth your time — we built a source of authority inside the store itself. Where UX organized the visual catalog, editorial brought it to life: it contextualized titles, made the case for why a given app deserved a place in a user's library, and gave hesitant buyers the trusted, human signal they needed to close the gap between interest and purchase.

This voice did real funnel work. Editorial-driven surfaces like Collections and Seasonal takeovers became genuine consideration and re-engagement engines. Editorial was how the catalog earned user trust at scale, and then provided recommendations that accelerated user purchase confidence.

PILLAR 3 — THE CONTENT SUPPLY CHAIN: FEEDING THE STOREFRONT

None of this matters without inventory. A beautifully organized, well-edited store with a thin catalog is a dead store. So the third pillar was the least visible and the most foundational: the supply chain that kept great, marketable content flowing in — our VR app and game developers were the engine that supplied the storefront.

So the work was about teaching them to fish – building the developer-side tool suite that allowed developers improve their own offerings and optimize how they were marketed. As this was done in aggregate by many developers, it raised the quality of the entire catalog the other two pillars had to work with. We gave them tools that made it easy to upload marketing assets, A/B test creative to find what actually converted, test discounts and pricing levers, localize for international markets, and connect into the store's editorial and marketing programs for broader support.

I personally leaned in very closely to build the pricing and in-product internationalization product pillars from the ground up, so that supply could scale across markets, not just titles. We learned quickly that price was a variable that fluctuated a lot, so the ability to watch the market and give developers the tools they needed to adapt their pricing, was critical.

HOW THE SYSTEM WORKED TOGETHER

The three pillars were not a sequence; they were a loop. Supply fed the catalog. UX brought order to the catalog and earned the click. Editorial carried the user through consideration to purchase. And every purchase, every A/B test, every pricing signal fed data back to developers and merchandisers — improving the next round of supply and the next set of ranking decisions. Synchronized, the system compounded; out of sync, it leaked.

On top of that core loop, we built growth levers to serve as accelerants to the flywheel. Price promotions and seasonal sales supercharged our bottom funnel during key moments when seasonal organic purchasing was already high — and they consistently increased TPV year over year. And off-platform performance marketing carried the storefront out into the world where new users lived. We built a performance marketing ad product that developers could use in a self-serve capacity. 

These were powerful accelerants on top of a system that already worked end to end, not substitutes for it. Altogether, the storefront supported an annual economy in the hundreds of millions in total payment volume.

WHAT I LEARNED

1. A storefront is a system, not a page. The instinct is to optimize the surface you can see — the tile, the PDP, the sale banner, the checkout flow. But the true gains are found in the seams between supply, discovery, consideration, and purchase. Thinking end-to-end, across all three, is what allowed each investment compound each other incrementally, instead of canceling each other out.

2. When you can't show the product, you have to engineer belief. Every pillar was, in its own way, a mechanism for making an invisible experience of an immersive VR app feel real before purchase — UX through immersive takeovers, editorial through trusted voice, supply through better developer-made assets. The medium's greatest strength was hidden at the point of sale, and the whole system existed to reveal it.

Beat Saber x Billie Eilish: Go-To-Market

EXPANDING VR CATEGORY PERCEPTION BEYOND GAMING

Beat Saber had a perception problem — not among players, but among everyone else.

Inside the VR community, Beat Saber was a phenomenon. One of the most-played titles on Meta Quest, beloved for its combination of rhythm, physicality, and pure joy. But outside that community, it was still categorized as a game. A thing gamers did. Interesting, perhaps, but not relevant to the tens of millions of people who would never identify themselves as a gamer.

In 2021, Billie Eilish was the defining pop artist of her generation — the first artist born in the 2000s to win a Grammy Album of the Year, with one of the most devoted and culturally active fanbases in the world. By partnering with Billie Eilish, Meta Quest had a unique opportunity to explain that Beat Saber was an experience that allows you to experience your favorite songs in an interactive way, that’s only

The campaign's job was not to sell a music pack. It was to use Billie Eilish's cultural gravity to make a different argument entirely: that VR was not a gaming peripheral. It was a new way to experience music.

THE INSIGHT: EXPERIENCE THE ALBUM, NOT THE GAME

The strategic shift that unlocked the campaign was a simple reframe: this was not a game you play to Billie Eilish songs. This was Billie Eilish's music, experienced in a way that had never existed before.

In six-degrees-of-freedom VR, you are not a passive listener. You are inside the music. The visual world built around her tracks responds to your movement. For an audience that had grown up consuming music through a screen, this was genuinely new — and the campaign was built around that newness, not around the headset or the game.

The brief to our creative partners was direct: reach Billie's audience where they already are, in the visual and emotional language they already respond to, and show them something they have never been able to do before.

THE CAMPAIGN: POP CULTURE PLACEMENTS, NOVEL SURFACES

Reaching a new audience required new media. Gaming channels and VR communities would have preached to the converted. This campaign went somewhere else.

The highest-visibility executions broke deliberately from the gaming mold. Neon signage brought the campaign into physical spaces with the aesthetic language of pop culture and nightlife, not tech or gaming. The imagery was Billie's world, not Meta’s. The message was presence and feeling, not features. For anyone who encountered it without context, it did not read as a headset advertisement. It read as a cultural moment.

Alongside out-of-home, we built a content strategy anchored in Meta's owned social channels and expanded, for the first time, into Facebook's broader distribution infrastructure — reaching audiences well beyond the existing VR community. Influencer partnerships were curated from music and lifestyle spaces rather than gaming, prioritizing creators whose audiences matched Billie's: young, predominantly female, culturally engaged, and with no prior relationship to VR.

Internally, this was the largest dedicated MarCom campaign Beat Saber had ever received, and the first time the team had been able to develop new content opportunities across Meta surfaces and Facebook distribution channels simultaneously. Building alignment across Beat Games, Interscope Records/UMG, and our internal IMM, ICS, and PML teams — while maintaining Billie's brand standards throughout — required the same kind of careful partner management that had defined the RE4 campaign. The creative had to feel like hers, or it would not work for her audience.

RESULTS

The audience we were reaching for showed up.

• First-day music pack sales: the highest of any Beat Saber music pack ever released

• We saw a halo effect to platform gender distribution - we successfully attracted a new audience to the platform.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. The case for VR as a music experience only landed because we made the case in the language of pop culture, not in tech or gaming vernacular. Meeting the audience in their world — neon, Billie's aesthetic, lifestyle channels — was what made the platform's capabilities feel relevant rather than abstract.

2. A music partnership is a brand partnership first. Every creative asset had to be true to Billie Eilish before it could be true to Meta Quest. Holding that standard internally, even when it created tension with our own brand instincts, was what made the collaboration trustworthy — to her team, to her audience, and to the market.

Resident Evil 4 in VR: Go-To-Market

BRINGING A CULTURAL INSTITUTION TO AN ENTIRELY NEW MEDIUM

Resident Evil 4 is not a game. It is a cultural institution.

First released in 2005, RE4 is widely regarded as one of the greatest games ever made, a title that redefined the third-person shooter genre and built one of gaming's most devoted fanbases over two decades. When Meta Quest committed to bringing RE4 to Meta Quest 2 as a full six-degrees-of-freedom VR experience, the stakes were immediate and unforgiving: Resident Evil fans are passionate, skeptical of ports, and quick to punish anything that feels like a cash-grab on a franchise they love.

At the same time, Meta Quest had a platform-level problem to solve. VR as a category needed repeated proof points to continue to push the product promise of VR Gaming, and RE4 was a single title that could answer, at commercial scale, the question every skeptical consumer and analyst was asking: is there a game worth buying a headset for? Resident Evil 4 was our answer. But getting there required building a new kind of GTM machine, negotiating a partnership with one of Japan's most protective IP-holders, and developing a campaign strategy that could do two difficult things simultaneously: honor a legendary franchise, and make the case that horror in six-degrees-of-freedom VR is something categorically new.

There was no playbook for this, so I wrote one.

WE HAD TO DO TWO THINGS AT ONCE – A TWO-PRONGED STRATEGY

Goal #1: Attract new users: Leverage RE4 as a reason to buy Meta Quest.

Goal #2: Re-engage existing users: Use RE4 as a reason for users to come back and re-engage with the platform.

The RE4 launch had to speak to audiences with fundamentally different relationships to both the game and the platform. Because we were solving two distinct problems, device sales and platform re-engagement, a single audience lens was not enough. I mapped different target segments for each strategy, and used this to craft unique GTM strategies for each goal.

THE CAMPAIGN PLATFORM: FEAR, REIMAGINED

The central creative and strategic insight behind the RE4 campaign was this: horror in VR is not a horror game you watch. It is a horror experience you survive.

On a flat screen, you watch Leon Kennedy fight his way through a Spanish village overrun by Las Plagas. In six-degrees-of-freedom VR, you are Leon Kennedy. The biological response is categorically different, and that difference was the campaign. I built the campaign platform around a single concept: phobia as proof of medium.

So we leaned into the specific fears that RE4 activates and made the argument that VR was the only medium capable of activating them fully. The campaign identified the distinct phobic responses the game reliably produces, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, fear of pursuit, fear of the unknown, and positioned each as evidence for why playing this game in VR was not just a better experience, but a fundamentally different one.

Alongside the phobia pillar, we developed a parallel consumer education track around motion comfort. VR horror presented a real barrier for potential players: the concern that immersive movement in a horror game would cause motion sickness. We addressed this head-on. Rather than minimize the concern, we educated users about the settings they have control over that can minimize discomfort. RE4 VR offered multiple locomotion modes, smooth locomotion, teleportation, snap turning, and comfort vignettes, and the campaign was deliberate about communicating these options clearly. Players were empowered to calibrate the experience to their own comfort level. The message was: you control the intensity.

That framing did two things. It removed one of the most common objections to VR adoption. And it signaled that Meta Quest took player experience seriously, that the platform was designed around players, not just hardware specs. What started as a defensive message became a trust-building one.

BUILDING THE MACHINE: A NEW MODEL FOR SYSTEM-SELLER CAMPAIGNS

RE4 required infrastructure that did not exist yet. The Meta Quest content marketing org had never run a campaign at this scale for a single title. Building it meant creating new processes, securing new resources, and bringing in new partners, across two continents, in two languages, with an IP-holder who had never worked with us before.

I established a new integrated working unit, IMM, ICS, PML, and PMM operating as a single core team, that interfaced with Social and Influencer, Owned and Operated, and Channel Marketing to ensure consistent messaging across all surfaces. This was the first time these functions had been organized around a single content title rather than operating in parallel lanes. The model required building trust, shared vocabulary, and a clear RACI across groups that had previously worked independently.

Alongside the US team, I partnered closely with a dedicated MarCom team in Japan, with coordination extended to secondary markets across EMEA. This was Meta Quest’s first bespoke international launch campaign for a content title, and managing it required maintaining alignment across time zones, language barriers, and radically different market contexts, all simultaneously.

The Channel Strategy

With internal and external resources aligned, I negotiated the channel mix directly with internal channel partners. The strategy leaned heavily on two big bets:

1. Owned social storytelling: rather than relying on a single launch trailer, we built a content cadence that lived on Meta Quest's social platforms in the weeks leading up to launch. This gave us space to develop the phobia narrative over time, introduce the motion comfort story, and build anticipation in a community that was already paying attention. 

2. Influencer amplification: we built a curated creator ecosystem anchored in horror gaming and VR communities. They were given the game, context, and creative latitude to produce authentic reactions, because authentic fear is more convincing than any brand message. The brief was simple: show what it actually feels like to survive RE4 in VR.

3. A dedicated retail bundle: We knew that we needed to represent this title at point of sale for the Meta Quest device, and offer some kind of price savings offer to maximize our leverage for lifting device sales. We pitched the offer internally, secured approval from CAPCOM, and coordinated ESRB and PEGI approvals to make this all come together. The bundle eventually drove a massive sales lift for Quest 2 devices in the US, making it one of the most commercially successful hardware and content co-marketing activations in the brand’s history.

RESULTS: RECORDS BROKEN, A PLATFORM REINVIGORATED

The numbers were immediate and unambiguous.

• We broke the record for most sales ever driven in a day on Meta Quest within 4 hours after launching

• RE4 was the first title launch to show incremental lift to platform device MAU, proving that we inflected platform re-engagement within the first weekend of launch

• More than 4x lift in Quest 2 device sales

• Won VR Game of the Year at The Game Awards

Beyond the metrics: RE4 shifted the narrative. For the first time, the gaming industry had evidence, not projections, not demos, but commercial proof, that a AAA title could perform on Meta Quest at a level that justified serious investment. What began as a campaign with no precedent ended as the template for how Meta Quest, and later Meta, would market its most important titles.

LEARNINGS THAT STILL APPLY

1. The best creative insight comes from the product itself, anchor on true differentiators. The phobia campaign pillar was not invented in a brief. It came from playing the game in VR and asking: what does this do that nothing else can? That question is the right starting point for any product marketing problem.

2. Consumer fear is a barrier until it's a feature. The motion comfort education track started as a defensive move, address the objection before it becomes a reason not to buy. It became something more: a demonstration that Meta Quest was listening to players, building for them, and committed to making VR accessible regardless of someone's propensity for motion sensitivity. Turning an obstacle into a trust-building moment is one of the most useful things marketing can do.

3. New frameworks require new infrastructure. We could not run a system-seller campaign through the existing content marketing model. It was not built for it. Rather than work around the constraints, I built a new model: new working team structure, new agency relationships, new channel negotiation approach, new measurement framework. The campaign's success was only possible because the infrastructure was designed for it first.

Oculus Quest 2: Go-To-Market

PREPARING TO CROSS THE CHASM OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADOPTION
In October 2020, Quest 2 launched into a consumer market that was curious about VR but still believed this was a product for PC Gamers and early adopters. Oculus had already shipped the Rift and the original Quest. The hardware worked. But VR as a category still carried the weight of its own hype. But with Quest 2, momentum was growing, and it was time to ride the wave of adoption from appealing to an early adopter audience, to now focus on the mainstream. It was time to cross the chasm.

At this time, I was now a full-time employee at Facebook Reality Labs (before it rebranded to Meta), and we knew that the stakes were increasing every year as we rode the tech adoption curve for VR. In 2020, we weren't just selling a new headset with Quest 2. We were asking people to believe that virtual reality had finally arrived — that it was real enough, fun enough, and socially legitimate enough to justify attention from the mainstream, not just from PC Gamers. This was a different ask than what we achieved with Rift, and it required a different kind of marketing.

As a PMM managing Oculus's AAA gaming portfolio during the Quest 2 launch, I was responsible for selecting and positioning the titles that would carry that argument. Not assembling a library — building a story. One where every game served a specific role in transforming consumer skepticism into conviction.

THE CONTENT STRATEGY: A FRAMEWORK ANCHORED IN TWO PILLARS
The portfolio strategy I built for Quest 2's launch was organized around a deliberate framework with two pillars.

Pillar 1 — Name Recognition Titles: games with existing IP equity that could transfer consumer trust to the platform. These titles answered the question: are the IP that I love on console and PC invested in VR as a platform?

Pillar 2 — A Paradigm-shifting Immersive Portfolio: VR-native experiences that demonstrated the power of immersive gaming, and how this was only possible on Quest. These titles answered the question: Why should I shift to this new gameplay paradigm? Why is it more powerful, exciting and fun than what I can achieve on console or PC?

THE EXECUTION: TITLE BY TITLE
Pillar 1: The Familiar Made New
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners was the anchor credibility title. Built over a decade across comics, television, and games, The Walking Dead IP carried a level of mainstream recognition that was now a household name, and the idea of a horror title being more horrifying in the immersive format of VR was an easy argument to make. Placing it at the center of the Quest 2 campaign said to skeptical consumers: something you already trust is here, and it’s scarier in VR. 

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners was integrated into both the "First Steps" launch anthem video, and the "Play for Real" campaign, spanning static and cinemagraph creative, Instagram and Facebook filters, influencer executions, and performance media. The title continued to anchor static and organic placements throughout the launch window.

Myst served a similar function for a different audience: the PC gaming enthusiast with a long memory. Its arrival on Quest 2 was a signal that the platform was serious — that it could deliver the kind of experience that defined a generation of gaming.

Pillar 2: Paradigm-Shifting Immersive Portfolio
Beat Saber was the clearest proof-of-concept for what VR uniquely enables. No screen, no controller, no console could replicate the full-body, music-synchronized physicality of Beat Saber — and by 2020 it had become the de facto shorthand for "this is what VR actually feels like." Its presence in the launch lineup wasn't just commercially strategic; it was definitional. Beat Saber was the game that made the promise of VR legible to people who had never tried it.

POPULATION:ONE represented something different entirely: game design with no precedent outside of VR. BigBox VR built a full battle royale — vertical traversal, free flight, destructible fortress building — from the ground up for virtual reality, with more players supported than any other game had achieved before in VR. These weren't ported mechanics. They were experiences that only existed because of what VR made possible. Where TWD: Saints & Sinners said "you know this," POPULATION:ONE said "you have never seen this before."

Other titles in the launch lineup — Real VR Fishing, The Climb 2, Pistol Whip: 2089, Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sister — each expanded the portfolio's genre range, demonstrating the breadth of the content ecosystem to consumers who weren't sure whether VR had something for them specifically.

BRAND DEVELOPMENT FOR NASCENT STUDIOS: THE POPULATION: ONE CASE
For a title like POPULATION:ONE — built by a small, independent studio without an established marketing infrastructure — my role extended well beyond GTM coordination. I managed the game's brand development alongside its launch.

This meant working closely with the BigBox VR team on asset direction, messaging frameworks, and how the game appeared in platform-level marketing. The strategic tension was real, POP:ONE needed to stand on its own as a destination title, with a brand identity distinctly its own. At the same time, it was being asked to carry part of Quest 2's product argument — to demonstrate what VR-native game design could achieve at its ceiling.

Getting that balance wrong in either direction would have damaged both. Subordinating the game's identity to the platform's story would have made POP:ONE feel like a feature, not a destination. Over-indexing on the title's brand at the expense of the campaign's coherence would have weakened the launch narrative overall.

I held that tension deliberately. POP:ONE appeared in hero placements across the "First Steps" anthem video and at Facebook Connect — but always positioned as something players would return to long after the launch moment had passed. The brand equity we helped BigBox VR build during the launch window was designed to be theirs to keep.

RESULTS: WHAT WE SHIPPED

• Announced 9 titles and major game updates at Facebook Connect / OC7 for the Quest 2 launch — managing developer relationships, press kit assets, and comms alignment across every title

• Integrated 5 titles into the "First Steps" Quest 2 anthem commercial

• Executed full "Play for Real" campaign featuring key titles across static creative, cinemagraphs, Instagram/Facebook filters, influencer activations, performance media, and reservable media partnerships

• Secured a last-minute opportunity to launch a Beat Saber Music Pack with international sensation BTS — driving millions of dollars in content sales, the highest of any Beat Saber music pack at the time

The process I implemented established a new marketing framework and GTM process that became the operational baseline for 15+ product marketers in the years that followed as they approached the methods for integrating the content slate into the Quest hardware GTM story, and in dedicated title launches.

WHAT I LEARNED

1. A hardware launch is always a content argument. Specs don't sell devices — stories do. The job of a content portfolio in a hardware GTM is to make the product promise tangible. Every title I selected was, in effect, an answer to the consumer question: what will I actually do with this thing? What is it good for?
   

2. Curation is a positioning act. Choosing which titles appear in hero placements isn't editorial — it's brand strategy. Each game that appears alongside the hardware is an implicit claim about what the platform stands for. I treated selection with the same rigor I'd apply to any positioning decision.
   

3. Brand development for emerging studios requires partnership, not production. Working with POPULATION: ONE wasn't a matter of briefing an asset and reviewing a deliverable. It was building a relationship with a studio that was figuring out its own identity in real time — and making sure the platform's marketing amplified, rather than absorbed, what they were creating. The goal was always for them to walk away from launch with something that was theirs.

Oculus Rift: Building Demand for a nascent product - Virtual Reality

THE CHALLENGE: BUILDING DEMAND FOR A PRODUCT NO ONE UNDERSTOOD YET
In 2017, consumer virtual reality was one of the most exciting — and most misunderstood — product categories in tech. Oculus had shipped the Rift. The hardware was real. The games were real. But the mass market didn't have a framework for understanding what VR actually was, let alone why they needed it.

We weren't competing with another gaming peripheral. We were competing with consumer skepticism, vague sci-fi associations, and a price point that demanded serious justification. Our job wasn't just to sell a product — it was to define a category, build belief, and earn a seat at the table next to the PlayStation and Xbox.

In this context I led the strategic development and execution of "Step Into Rift" — Oculus Rift's first fully integrated brand campaign — as Account Lead at space.camp, the dedicated agency division I helped build from the ground up inside Ayzenberg Group to service the Oculus account exclusively.

AUDIENCE STRATEGY: WHO WERE WE BUILDING FOR?
Before we could write a line of copy or brief a single creator, we needed to know exactly who we were talking to — and in what order.

We identified four audience segments, with clear primary and secondary prioritization:

Primary:

• PC Gamers — the most natural hardware fit; as they had already invested in high-performance gaming rigs that could run the device.

• Tech Enthusiast Gamers — early adopters primed to lead cultural adoption once we crossed the chasm.

  Secondary:

• Tech Enthusiast Non-Gamers — curious but needed proof of relevance

• Console Gamers — more skeptical; lower priority for initial awareness push

This tiering wasn't academic. It shaped every channel decision, every influencer brief, every media buy. We couldn't be everything to everyone. We needed to plant the flag with the audiences most likely to believe — and most likely to influence others.

THE STRATEGIC PLATFORM: "STEP INTO RIFT"
The core insight behind "Step Into Rift" was simple but hard-earned: VR couldn't be explained — it had to be experienced. And since most consumers couldn't walk into a store and try it, we had to bring the experience to them. This led us to our tagline, an active invitation to, "Step into Rift."

"Step into" made it active, inviting, and human. It wasn't "Experience Rift" or "The Future of Gaming." It was an invitation. Come in.

The campaign rallied around "Go Big" titles — priority game launches like Lone Echo, Robo Recall, Echo Arena, and The Unspoken — titles that demonstrated what the platform could actually do at its best. Rather than lead with hardware specs, we led with moments: the ones that made players forget where they were.

The campaign strategy had five pillars:

  1. Expand and elevate the brand through a premium, "Go Big" title-anchored campaign

  2. Activate paid media on high-intent gaming and tech properties (expansionary targeting)

  3. Build and manage the @OculusRift social presence — talking to gamers like a gamer, and integrating our brand presence into the gaming community in an authentic, organic way.

  4. Develop a trusted influencer ecosystem on YouTube

  5. Leverage key promotional moments (Amazon Prime Day, Holiday) to convert intent to purchase

THE DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY: TRUSTING THE CREATOR
Here's what we knew about our audience: they didn't trust brand advertising. PC Gamers and Tech Enthusiast Gamers are among the most ad-skeptical consumers in any category. They do their research. They go to YouTube. They trust creators — people who've spent hundreds of hours in the exact games and gear they're considering.

That's why influencer marketing wasn't a channel add-on for "Step Into Rift." It was a strategic cornerstone.

I oversaw the development and execution of a structured influencer ecosystem through space.camp's ION division — a dedicated talent and content team that managed influencer discovery, partnerships, talent relationships, and livestream orchestration end-to-end.

The model we built:

1. Curated creator network — We identified and cultivated a network of PC gaming and tech-focused YouTubers whose audiences mapped precisely to our primary segments. These weren't mega-influencers with diffuse audiences — they were credible voices in the specific communities we were trying to reach.

2. Content-first briefs — Influencers weren't handed scripts. They were given game access, context, and creative latitude to produce authentic content that reflected their genuine reactions. The brief was always: show what it actually feels like to play this in VR.

3. Rift Streams — We developed a distinctive livestream format where influencers recorded gameplay at our studio, then broadcast it live on the Oculus Rift Facebook page while the influencer engaged with the audience in real time. This created a hybrid owned/earned media moment: brand-controlled amplification with creator-level authenticity.

4. Cross-channel amplification — Influencer content fed the paid media engine. High-performing creator content was amplified through paid social and digital display to extend reach beyond organic audiences.

5. Continuous optimization — The agency ran a "Listen → Create → Share" feedback loop: real-time social listening and performance analytics informed which content types, game titles, and creator formats were resonating — and we updated briefs accordingly.

RESULTS: WHAT WE BUILT
Over the 2017–2018 campaign cycle (encompassing Step Into Rift and its evolution into Change the Game.), we delivered:

From Influencer Marketing:

• Hundreds of creator campaigns

• Thousands of pieces of content produced

• Over 100M total views

• Thousands of total engagements

From Paid Media:

• Over 20 multi-variant media campaigns across 22 global regions

• Billions of impressions

• Millions of site visits

• Direct sales at a very healthy ROI

From Owned Social:

• Launched dedicated Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels

• Drove hundreds of thousands of new followers

• Millions of views

• Hundreds of thousands of engagements

Our Creative Output:

• 2 anthem commercials

• 14 pieces of static key art

• 17 marquee game trailers

• 1 experiential activation at The Game Awards

WHAT I LEARNED: PRINCIPLES THAT STILL APPLY
Looking back, a few things made this work — and they're as relevant now as they were then:

1. Category creation is a storytelling problem first. When no one has language for your product, your job is to give it to them. Every positioning decision, every creative choice, every influencer brief was in service of one question: after someone sees this, do they understand what VR gaming actually is and why it matters? Enabling audiences to understand our product value was a barrier we had to overcome prior to scaling growth.

2. Distribution strategy is product strategy. Choosing to bet on YouTube and creator content wasn't a media tactic — it was a recognition that trust, not reach, was the constraint. We could buy impressions. We couldn't buy credibility. The influencer ecosystem was how we earned it at scale.

3. Audience precision beats audience breadth. We chose depth over diffusion — going hard on the audiences most likely to convert and most likely to influence others. That focus made everything sharper.

4. Great creative campaigns require great infrastructure. "Step Into Rift" wasn't just a tagline — it was a system: influencer briefs, production workflows, social listening loops, media amplification, analytics feedback cycles. I was responsible for building and running that system alongside an exceptional cross-functional team.

5. The brand story has to evolve as the category does. "Step Into Rift" did the job of planting the flag. "Change the Game" did the job of deepening the relationship. Knowing when to evolve the story — and how — is as important as getting the original story right.

CSR2: Ultimate Racing Challenge wins a Shorty Award

Worked with the ION team at Ayzenberg Group to develop an integrated social and influencer campaign to promote the sequel to the global mobile racing game, CSR. This campaign was developed for agency client Zynga, partnering with Natural Motion Games. It won a 2017 Shorty Award in the category of Best Game Apps, and won a Bronze distinction in the overall Games category.

View the case study

"LET'S TALK MUSIC" SERIES AT LOS ANGELES COLLEGE OF MUSIC

Led a team at LACM and Jensen Communications, to promote LACM's ongoing "Let's Talk Music" series and worked with a digital video team to bring the series online using YouTube's "Streaming events" feature. Promoted both the live audience element (which was open to the public for free with RSVP), the livestream, and media coverage both before and after the event. 

View all LACM "Let's Talk Music" recorded interviews

Media Coverage:
San Gabriel Valley Tribune - What rocker Joe Walsh had to say to aspiring musicians in Pasadena
Pasadena Now - Los Angeles College of Music's "Let's Talk Music" Series Hosted Legendary Drummer Stewart Copeland
Music Connection - L.A. College of Music (LACM) Hosts An Evening with Gavin Rossdale
TheSoundLA.com - Joe Walsh To Do Special Q&A Event At LA College of Music
Reuters - Los Angeles College of Music's "Let's Talk Music" Series Hosts Joe Walsh In Conversation for Live Audience & Online Viewers

Academic Research Reporting - Red Hen Lab: Summer of Code 2015

Working with UCLA Communication Studies and Professors Francis Steen and Mark Turner, organized results for the Red Hen Lab Consortium's submission to Google Summer of Code 2015. The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab is an international consortium for research on multimodal communication. They develop open-source tools for joint parsing of text, audio/speech, and video, using datasets of various sorts, most centrally a very large dataset of international television news called the UCLA Library Broadcast NewsScape. 

The report can be found here.

Read more about The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab here. Read more about the UCLA Library Broadcast NewsScape here.

Media Relations - Ovation tv "The Art of Music" for Los Angeles College of Music

I negotiated promotion of Los Angeles College of Music within a segment of Ovation TV's "The Art Of" television show. Worked with the segment producer to develop a story line, interviews and b-roll content for segment. Facilitated all interviews, provided media coaching to LACM staff and students and promoted airing of segment in social media.

Sponsorship/Media Outreach - Avi Roth: Coffeegraph, Think Tank Gallery, Los Angeles

Worked with Think Tank Gallery, Los Angeles to garner sponsorship support and relevant partners to host a 21-day art show and event series celebrating the art of Avi Roth and his Coffeegraph technique. Integrating a live coffee bar into the gallery space, along with a working speakeasy pop-up diner, the space hosted events ranging from coffee talks and tastings, to performance art and live music. I orchestrated support from LA Weekly and the event's publicity campaign, landing coverage by KCET, LA Magazine, LA Times and more.

Selected Coverage:

KCET Artbound - Avi Roth and Downtown L.A.'s Coffee Counter-Culture

LA Magazine - The Art of Coffee: Everyone's Favorite Morning Beverage Gets the Gallery Treatment

Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine - Downtown Exhibit Combines Some of L.A.'s Top Roasters with 'Coffeegraph' Art

Barista Magazine - Avante-Garde Art Exhibition, Coffeegraph, Showcases Coffee, Thanks to L.A. Coffee Club

The WILD Magazine - This is Not Latte Art

Eater LA - Think Tank Gallery is Serving Coffee with Ghost Peppers

LA Canvas - NOT JUST FOR DRINKING: COFFEE, COFFEE, AND MORE COFFEE AT THINK TANK GALLERY

LA Times - 17 gifts for Coffee Lovers

LA I'm Yours - Coffeegraph

Media Outreach/Social Media - The GORGEOUS Project

THE GORGEOUS PROJECT is a photography book that explores the power of beauty, gender and their illusionary qualities. I provided pro-bono publicity, social media management and writing services for this project - writing the project's official press releases, pitching to press, and framing editorial sections of the actual book. 

Selected Coverage:

Huffington Post - 'GORGEOUS,' New Photography Book By Rob Lebow And Masha Kupets, Explores Beauty And Gender

Queerty - PHOTOS: High-Glamour Queers Get Gorgeous For New Photo Project

New Now Next - Tammie Brown, Delta Work Get “Gorgeous” In New Photo Book

Drag Official - THE GORGEOUS PROJECT CREATORS DISCUSS WORKING WITH DELTA WORK, MISS FAME, TAMMIE BROWN AND THEIR PLANS FOR 2014

Media Outreach / Backstage Press Tours - LA Opera

At LA Opera, I coordinated Public Relations efforts with the Director of Public Relations from November 2012 until July 2014. From an international press conference with Plácido Domingo and Renée Fleming, to backstage tours for niche bloggers, to specialized pitches for unique events, I helped to garner extensive coverage for a number of initiatives at LA Opera.

Selected Coverage:

LA Times - Ahead of 'Falstaff' performances, L.A. Opera talks turkey - literally

KCRW "Which Way LA" - Go behind the scenes at the L.A. Opera

La Opinión - Plácido Domingo invita a angelinos a ver 'Carmen'

EFE - Plácido Domingo lleva "Carmen" a Los Ángeles

LA Weekly - "Mod Night at the Opera" 

LAist - "Pencil this in: Mod Night at the Opera"

LA I'm Yours - "Mod Night at the Opera"

Musicians Institute Conversation Series

The MI Conversation Series provided artists, producers & music industry professionals with an opportunity to educate and inspire by sharing their experiences with Musicians Institute students and a live audience of fans online. Hosted by Wayne Jobson, past guests included Ziggy Marley, Jackson Browne, Brandon Boyd, Matt Sorum, Dave Wakeling, Nick Hexum, Adrian Young, James Valentine, Mark McGrath, Don Was and Slipknot. A special edition hosted by Alt 98.7fm’s Darren Rose featured special guest Nikki Sixx. 

“Songwriting is a very visual art form. It’s how to describe things with words or music that allows people to see into that life. He was a master.” - Jackson Browne on Warren Zevon

“I still think it’s really important for some songs to be very human. There were some songs on Tragic Kingdom that we didn’t even record to a click track at all. It’s not perfectly in time, those songs, but that’s by design.” - Adrian Young on Tragic Kingdom

Recorded conversations were made available on-demand on Livestream.com. Partners such as The Recording Academy® Producers & Engineers Wing® used the MI Conversation Series as an opportunity to offer their members an exclusive calendar event that celebrated music, production and education.

For Musicians Institute, it provided a way to connect with thousands of prospective students through social media, as the live-streaming conversations were promoted by the guests to their fans, and created an invaluable learning opportunity for students already enrolled in the school.

Event Marketing/Artist Booking - Musicians Institute Conversation Series, Bonnaroo 2012 in partnership with Rolling Stone

In addition to live performances by MI students and alumni, brand integration at Bonnaroo 2012 included a partnership with Rolling Stone to host conversations in the Musicians Institute "GO LIVE!" tent with select performers from the festival and Rolling Stone writer Benjy Eisen who served as host. Guests included: Ben Folds Five, Yelawolf, SOJA, Dumpstaphunk, ALO, Here We Go Magic, Chappo and Dirty Guv'nahs. I was connected with artist management through Superfly Presents and booked all conversations in the tent, coordinating artist transportation, talking points and social media promotion for each event during the festival. The conversations were recorded and posted on Rollingstone.com. Links to view the conversations are listed below.

Rolling Stone - Chappo chat Craigslist, New Record at Bonnaroo

Rolling Stone - Dumpstaphunk Talk Funk, the Dirtiest Four-Letter Word, at Bonnaroo

Rolling Stone - ALO Talk About Improvisation and Sustainable Growth at Bonnaroo

Rolling Stone  - SOJA Talk About Reggae Roots and Politics at Bonnaroo

Rolling Stone - Ben Folds Five Talk About Their New Album at Bonnaroo

Rolling Stone - Yelawolf talks Old Influences and New Projects at Bonnaroo

Rolling Stone - Dirty Guv'nahs on Meeting Expectations and Levon Helm's Christmas Party

Rolling Stone - Here We Go Magic Reveal Their Origin Story at Bonnaroo

Event Marketing - MI Annex, SXSW 2012 in partnership with House of Blues

SXSW has always been a paradigm for brands. The number one question is: How do brands connect with the artists attracting the most attention, and more so, the crowds of attendees that can't afford an official badge?

Musicians Institute partnered with House of Blues Entertainment to solve this problem in 2012 by launching a pop-up venue on the corner of 6th and Red River that was programmed by Musicians Institute and multiple partner agencies. Hosting sets that spanned a wider genre than any venue at SouthBy, the MI Annex hosted indie rock, heavy metal, death metal, hip hop and a select list of MI Alumni over the course of four days, with sets by LIGHTS, A$AP Rocky, Schoolboy Q, Beach Fossils, Craft Spells, Titus Andronicus, El Ten Eleven, Asking Alexandria, We Came As Romans, Job for a Cowboy and more. The MI Annex was a wild success, attracting massive crowds and extensive attention in social media.

In addition to the MI Annex, Musicians Institute also participated in the SXSW Trade Show and hosted stripped down sets by MI Alumni in addition to instrument lessons and guitar giveaways used for lead capture. Select footage from the event is available below.

Event Marketing - MI Live! Coachella 2011 & 2012, Stagecoach 2011 & 2012

As part of an ongoing branding campaign, Musicians Institute organized a series of corporate sponsorships at various music festivals. I worked with the school's Marketing Director to create an event marketing format that was easily replicated at numerous festivals. "MI Live!" hosted an air-conditioned environment with a small stage that hosted sets by MI students and alumni and an instrument corner by Roland on the grounds of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival (2011 & 2012), Stagecoach Festival (2011 & 2012), Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival (2011 & 2012), Sunset Strip Music Festival 2011, SXSW Pitchfork #Offline 2011, NAMM (2011 & 2012), and the KROQ Epicenter Festival 2010. I booked the artist showcases at all events, and worked with the director to coordinate the rest of the logistics for the set-up, break down and operation of the tent at each festival or event.

Musicians Institute Full Ride Scholarship Contest

I took over MI's Full Ride Scholarship competition in its second year of existence and worked with the school's Marketing Director to expand the contest internationally. Using Sonicbids as an entry platform, I organized a custom entry process and strengthened the contest's rules and regulations. I oversaw the panel judging after public voting, and organized the final concert performance, flying students to Hollywood from as far as Estonia, Belgium and Korea to perform with an A-list backing band of industry veteran hired guns. The contest exposed MI to a massive audience internationally and drew in a measurable increase in applications, as a completed application for admission to the school was a prerequisite for entering the contest.

MI Artist Series at The Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood Blvd

The Musicians Institute Artist Series hosted monthly showcases of MI student and alumni bands at the Hard Rock Cafe on Hollywood Blvd. I pursued this partnership and organized a series of showcases that lasted for over a year at the hip location, providing Hard Rock with quality talent, and exposing Musicians Institute to the Hollywood tourist market through student and alumni performances.

Non-Profit Event/Fundraising - Jam for Japan in partnership with Relief International

In response to the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Musicians Institute wanted to give back. To serve the desire of the school's owner, Hisatake Shibuya, to give back to those in need, I worked with Relief International to organize the "Jam for Japan" campaign, which funded music education grants to replace lost instruments, sheet music and supplies for music programs in the Sendai region that were affected by the disaster.