Chief marketing officer Monica Austin is on a mission to make Blizzard one of the most relevant entertainment brands in the world.
“There’s so many ways that consumers can spend their time,” reflects Austin. “We’re not just competing with games. We’re competing with film, TV, YouTube, books and entertainment. Our mission is super simple: it’s to create such hype and excitement for our games that players can’t help but play. That means that Blizzard has to be a leader, not just in gaming, but a brand that players and non-players can talk about, follow and celebrate.”
Blizzard is home to some of the most legendary franchises in gaming history including World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch.
“They have been shaping culture for decades,” says Austin. “World of Warcraft has had half a billion players. My role as CMO is really to honor that legacy while making these brands and these games feel urgent and modern and unavoidable in today’s landscape. My vision is ultimately to build marketing that drives that cultural conversation and impact today and for years to come.”
Prior to joining Blizzard, Austin held senior leadership roles at Calm and Netflix. Brand Innovators caught up with her from her office in Los Angeles to talk about how the brand is engaging fandoms, showing up in culture and working with NBA star Luka Doncic, a Top 500 Overwatch player. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does this vision come to life in your creative?
Creative is where I love to play. At Blizzard, it’s really rooted in three principles: entertainment, talkability and player focus. We want to approach our marketing the same way we approach our game design, in the same way that we approach our player engagement as entertainment. We want our campaigns to feel like content you would want to watch and share, we never want it to feel like traditional advertising. Everything we build is really meant to be shareable and talkable.
If people are sharing, posting, debating our creative, we know we’ve broken through. We always start with players. We have one of the most passionate communities in the world. Our creative works best when we can really spark a dialog with our community that celebrates and amplifies their passion. It shows up in different ways across our franchises. It’s in cinematic storytelling, cultural activations (we just got back from Gamescom for a big announcement for World of Warcraft) and also in the community-driven approach and celebrity and sports partnerships. We want campaigns that feel bigger than marketing.
Can you talk about how you engage the fandom to get them talking?
We have a community team that’s been with World of Warcraft as an example. My lead on community has been here for 20 years. He is the expert not just the game itself, but really has his thumb on our core players. One of the things that’s so important to the work that we do even as we think about bringing in new players, is letting fans know what is happening. We are deeply invested in where the community is. We have a very open dialog and really try to be radically transparent with our core.
They deserve that from us given the amount that they’re investing their time and their energy. We want to show up for them. An example being we were just at Gamescom. Germany is one of our second biggest countries for World of Warcraft. EMEA is a huge market for us. We want to be in the places where our players are. They really want to engage with our devs and designers. We also gave them the opportunity to get their hands on the game and on the housing feature first.
How are you working with creators and influencers?
We really view them as more than just a marketing lever. They’re co-creators with us. We really want to create an authentic connection. We have a creator program for World of Warcraft of over 800 folks from all different levels that are really just authentically connected to World of Warcraft. We build a lot of bespoke programs just for them.
Social is just a proxy of word of mouth. It’s a visible way to be in the dialog, be in the discussion and make sure that we’re reflecting how players are feeling about the game in any one moment, but also some of the other cultural ways that we can insert our brand into moments. The other powerful angle from a marketing lens is research. We use our community team and social insights and data, but we also have a really robust research group where we spend a lot of time thinking about our advertising and testing it in a way to make sure we’ll connect with the right players in the right ways.
Can you talk about why it’s so important for you to be part of the culture?
Culture is where relevance is built. People want to be part of the things that feel really relevant. We know the No. 1 way that people make decisions are recommendations from friends and family and trusted influencers. A lot of that is water cooler talk – what are people playing? What are they watching? What are they talking about? Players aren’t comparing us to other games. They’re also comparing us to other brands and artists and entertainers in the world. Blizzard is part of that cultural conversation. We really earn the right to be part of people’s daily lives, not just their gaming time.
That’s the ultimate fuel for word of mouth. It’s the most powerful driver of discovery and engagement. When fans see Blizzard connected to those moments and people and platforms that they already love, it creates an energy that no amount of traditional media spend can replicate. There’s no amount of spots and dots that can do what cultural relevance can do. I think about it from a pure, where do our players live? They really live in culture first and game second. If we want to matter to them, we need to show up in both places.
You recently did a campaign with LA Lakers player Luka Doncic. Can you please discuss the strategy behind it?
Fun fact is that Luka Doncic is an actual top 500 Overwatch player out of millions of players. He’s what we call a grandmaster. He must play as much Overwatch as he plays basketball. Don’t tell his coach! There was a viral video like three years ago that really highlighted his play in Overwatch that sparked a relationship that my team here at Blizzard has had for many years. As I came in and started thinking about the next phase for Overwatch, we’ve had such success with collaborations. We’ve worked with Le Serafem. We’ve worked with Porsche. We’ve worked with so many iconic brands and artists. Many of them have authentic ties either through direct ties with our players or direct ties with the game itself.
But we have never partnered with an athlete, certainly one that was an authentic top 500 player, that just breaks through any resistance you have to him as a connection to Overwatch. That just made it so powerful when we got to Season 18. We realized this was going to be one of the biggest seasons we’ve had to date with some of the biggest updates and features, particularly for this new mode of play that we have called Stadium. It just became the perfect opportunity to bring Luka in. By partnering him, we were really able to connect Overwatch to sports culture in a way that felt massively credible and super fun.
How have your past experiences at other brands helped shape your current perspective?
At Netflix, I really learned how to market content as culture. Every campaign there was designed to break through. That was our number one mantra, how to spark conversation and feel entertaining in its own right. At Calm, I really learned how to blend product and brand and performance marketing. And I saw firsthand how marketing can really create emotional value for people in their daily lives, particularly in a category like mental health and mindfulness.
These experiences really taught me the importance of balancing performance marketing with breakthrough creative marketing. You need that discipline of data ROI acquisition, but you also need to have a boldness of brand marketing and a point of view on how to spark conversation.
At Blizzard, I try to bring both of those together, driving growth through ROI-driven tactics, but also making sure that we’re building creative campaigns and ultimately building franchises that will just remain iconic from here on out.
How are you thinking about holiday marketing?
Holidays are an important moment of togetherness and that is really important to our players. They’re also a time of inherent social gatherings. They’re a time to play together. It’s a time to give gifts and share experiences. Our holiday strategy really is centered around that, around celebration, community. We think about seasonal in-game events, special collabs. We have certainly offered to make Blizzard games part of our family traditions and rituals that we want to continue to stoke. We know that we see a ton of co-playing together, particularly for World of Warcraft around these holiday events.
We also think about holidays as a platform often for great creative experiences. Some of the things that we’re cooking on are related to launches that we have later in 2026. We think that the holiday moments are great launch pads for some of these campaigns. If you think about the DNA of World of Warcraft, it’s a fantasy brand with amazing worlds and characters. Holidays can be a really exciting time to translate the nature of those into some of our most iconic brands and franchises.
