Why Discord is making key hires to build out its advertising business

Quests, Discord’s first official advertising product, launched earlier this year. So far, this tool has been used exclusively by video game publishers to reach potential players. Last week, Discord announced the hiring of former FaZe Clan svp of partnerships and business development Adam Bauer as its new vp of sales, with the explicit goal of growing Quests.

“The beauty of Quests is that it’s a value-driven experience; it’s really rooted in, if you engage with a cool piece of content, you unlock value in the form of an in-game reward or an avatar that’s available on Discord, which people usually pay for,” Bauer said. “As we think about the future roadmap, and working with more traditional partners and advertisers, we’re going to keep that same mindset.”

Bauer is not the only marketing and sales expert to join Discord’s advertising team in recent months. In addition to Bauer’s esports experience, his team includes talent from other social platforms as well, including Discord director of sales for advertiser solutions Meena Mutha, who made the jump from Snap to Discord in April, and former Twitch director of client strategy Stephanie Russo, who has served as a senior account executive at Discord since May.

“Attracting talent is not the problem,” Bauer said. “It’s finding the right talent that understands the mission. What Jason [Citron] and Stan [Vishnevskiy], the co-founders, really want is to make sure that Discord stays a place where users are building genuine friendships around play, and so they don’t want that to get lost in building a big ads platform.”

Discord is still in the early days of its push into advertising, but marketers who are already active on the platform see lots of potential in the future. Brands are increasingly acknowledging Discord’s role as a social platform and hub for content creation, rather than simply a messaging service. Some believe it would be wise for Discord to use some of the more in-depth advertising tools employed by other platforms, such as YouTube-style multi-channel network or a dedicated agency partner program.

“Whether it’s amplifying your Quest with community activations, or accessing certain data that we wouldn’t be able to normally,” said Logan Jory, the founder of the Discord marketing company Wildfire, ”those kinds of partner program things — or to even run Quests ourselves — would be interesting, where we take on a media buying role on the platform for our clients.”

Whether or not Discord allows third parties to eventually run their own Quests, it’s clear that there is a growing opportunity for brands, and not just game publishers, to reach consumers on the platform. Brands such as the Gen Z sports betting company Rivalry already maintain vibrant and large Discord servers; Rivalry’s has over 10,000 members. Moving forward, the company has taken note of Discord’s conscious push into marketing and advertising, and is excited at the prospect of working more closely with Discord for its future marketing efforts.

“I had a look deep into [Quests]. Yes, it is very gamer-heavy, but a lot of the things they’re doing there align to a lot of the things that we’re trying to create, as far as tasks and missions you can complete in order to get bonuses back,” said Rivalry global head of marketing Grant Flannery. “So, for us, there probably is a lot of synergy in the way that they’re trying to gamify the overall Discord experience.”