How Hasbro, Twitch, and Chicago Fire FC Are Building Communities That Drive Brand Loyalty

Welcome to Adspeak, AdWeek's podcast about the business of marketing, media, and creativity. In this episode, we're sharing a conversation recorded live at one of AdWeek's events, featuring leaders from across the industry discussing the ideas shaping brands right now. Let's get into it. >> Welcome to our session on the future of play. We've got some amazing panelists signed up for you today. But before we get into it, I'd like to ask each of you to introduce yourselves and can you tell me in one word what's one emerging behavior that you're seeing reshape how marketers or just people, consumers engage with the future of play? Dan, let's start with you. >> Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me out. Nice to meet you all. Nice to see you all. Uh, so I'm Dan Mariati. I'm the chief marketing officer at the Chicago Fire Football Club, which is an MLS team. Thank you. >> Lots of fans. >> Can't see you clapping, but I appreciate. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so we compete in the MLS. the uh the soccer league here in the US, fastest growing league in the US. And the one word that I think about the future of play for me is connection and the human connection that it drives. >> Rachel, yes. Hi, I'm Rachel Delphin. Thank you for having me here. I'm the chief marketing officer of Twitch. Live >> Thank you. Probably work for us. Um uh live interactive video streaming that really brings people together, creates a sense of belonging. The the word that I think about is spontaneity. I think what we're seeing is that it used to be right clay was thought of as sort of a a juvenile or a thing that kids do and what we're seeing now is you know adults sort of embracing the idea of play and unstructured play. >> Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely that crossgenerational element which we're going to talk a little bit about later too. And Jason >> hi uh Jason Bunch CMO at Hasbro. Um I'd say the actually have two words some already completely violated your question but uh I think community proliferation like and it's I think community itself is not new but I think what we're seeing is just both fragmentation and proliferation of communities which just puts more demands on marketing which a lot of us know to really connect in authentic ways. So, >> and I want to start with you, Jason, because many people in here will know Hasbro as the maker of Monopoly, Hungry Hippos, which we were talking about backstage. Um, but you're sort of bridging this gap now between traditional games and play and digital. And you just announced a new strategy at the start of this year, which is playing to win. So, I want to hear about how you're executing that strategy and your marketing, and you know, what does it look like in practice? >> Yeah, I think um for a lot of folks historically, Hasbro's 100 years old. It is exactly that. It's a toy company. Certainly board games. I think it's it's no uh it's no kind of obvious thing to say that you know the category itself has been under pressure for several years. Playing behavior has changed. Kids are increasingly on digital earlier. That's not news. Um but we're also seeing kind of the aging up of kids, right? So whether you're in your 20s, 30s, 50s, 60s, there's this nostalgia play, a collectibility play. And so as we think about the categories we're going to go into, toy will always be a part of who we are. Board games will be a part of who we are, but increasingly Magic the Gathering, which is out of our Wizards divisions, Dungeons and Dragons, uh is growing like like hotcakes. And then you're going to see us uh starting next year start to launch video games. Um we have some pretty big announcements coming up at the Game Awards on December 11th next month. A few surprises perhaps, but it is something that we're leaning into. said as we think about kind of those lifetime of play moments uh we want to be relevant uh and I think we have to be where our consumers are these days which is increasingly digital as much as it is uh tactile. >> Yeah. So definitely a brand like an evolution and Rachel for Twitch you know the whole platform you mentioned it there is built in this idea of like interactivity and spontaneity and gaming is a huge part of that but you know in recent years Twitch has branched out into like music, entertainment, comedy, all different areas. How are you marketing to that like expanding audience and you've been there since 2018 so you must have seen it change a lot right? Yes, absolutely. So, I think gaming was a really natural place for us to start. Um, ultimately it's about building community and a sense of belonging. And so, things that people are have interest in, um, things that people have interest in, right, can can form the basis of relationships and and provide, right, the content sort of background or connection point for for the streamers, for the creators on our service. Um, from a marketing perspective, it really starts with what's the what's working within the community, right? Where are we seeing some emerging and growing and sort of organically growing kinds of content? And that's certainly happened in music. That's certainly happened in sport. We're seeing a real embrace I think particularly within the music community. Either they're going on streams to sort of like promote um you know albums or projects or whatever it is. But also just to connect with fans, right? Those a thousand fans, those 100 true fans who want to understand how do you make the music? What inspires the music? and get to know the person a little bit more. So, we've Justin Bieber, Lizo, Dojaca, there's a lot of um really high-profile musicians who've really embraced embraced the service. >> Yeah. >> Um and similarly, we've seen um the same kind of embrace or uh perhaps a little bit more new is around sport content and not just the games necessarily, but really the commentary, the culture, the fandom around it. So, the breakout moment this year was really around studs, who are two women. and they play in the WNBA and they took their Twitch community backstage basically across all of WNBA all-star weekend and had huge response, right, of just seeing like what's player relationships like behind the scenes, how much camaraderie existed. And so I think there is this still and growing sense of, you know, authenticity. Let's remove the veneer. Let's remove the artifice and really like get to know get to know people and get to know, you know, other other fans. >> Yeah. So little increasingly the the the brief I guess is in the chat or in the comments. Yeah. For your team. >> Absolutely. And I say so first step is like hey how do we integrate the content into the current ecosystem communities of Twitch. We don't want them to feel separate from but a part of. And so we have a lot of community groups, ambassador groups, um clubs where we get content creators together. So when we see one of those like burgeoning areas, let's get them together because collaboration is so core to having a satisfying experience but also to being successful. Um, and then there's sort of the expand of, okay, well, now we'll build some campaigns around it. So, we did really fun campaign around the DJs that we have on the on the service called 808. It has some play on DJ culture. Um, and did this like big global like 24-hour music festival. So, we'll do a little integration followed by Yeah. campaign. Twitch's audience is so engaged. I want to come on to that later cuz I end up asking too. And then Dan, you know, for you, you started at Chicago Fire FC in 202. And at the start of this year, you entered what you've described as like a new era. You have some really passionate fans and you're building the marketing around them. Tell me more about that. >> Yeah, so I think to explain kind of where we've gone from the marketing perspective, it's important to understand where the club's been. So the MLS, fastest growing league in the US, it's only 30 years old, so it's still relatively new. Uh the Chicago Fire about 27 years old, so relatively young still. Got off to a really hot start as a club. We're still the only expansion team in America to ever win a title in their first year. Problem is after those first five years the team went into a bit of a rough stretch. We had multiple owners, multiple stadiums, multiple leadership groups, just kind of constant churn where there was really no stability. 2019, Joe Manu, who's the founder and now chairman of the board of Morning Star, bought the club as a passion project and declared this desire to want to build a world-class club. Of course, you guys all know what happened right after 2019. Co shut the league down for a while. So, it kind of pushed plans back a little bit, but now we're really focused on how do we turn this club into a world-class club. If you look at MLS, the clubs that get the most traction at the moment are actually new clubs. They're clubs that have launched in the last five to six years or so. So, you think the LAFC's, the Austin FC's of the world. And so, we've really built a lot of our marketing and brand efforts around this internal northstar of not the fire that you thought you knew. And so, how do we reintroducing ourselves to the market? And for us, we do it around a few pillars. So, we are Chicago. Yeah, I think if you ever go to an MLS game, especially the Chicago Fire game, so diverse. We have people from two years old to 100 years old in our crowd, every background. And so we really want to embrace that. We talk a lot about innovating and really not resting on our laurels, like needing to reintroduce oursel knowing that we we represent the biggest sport in the world, but we have to bring it to the market. And then we talk a lot about uh we're more more than a team, we're a club. So we are Chicago Fire Football Club. Every other team in our market is a team. And so you guys have both already touched on community and and culture. We really want to lean into that and embrace bring people into um kind of marketing with us. >> Yeah. And having those one-on-one communications is important, too. Like don't your CEO write a letter, Dear Chicago, at the start of this year to fans. >> Yeah. So, um we're we're actually we announced about 6 months or so ago that we're going to build our own stadium for the first time. So, we've always been a tenant in other people's stadium. Right now we're playing the Bears Stadium, which is great stadium, Soldier Field, but it's 62,000 seats, which is a bit too big for for soccer. Um, and so the way we announced the stadium was actually our owner, not not the president, our owner wrote a letter called Dear Chicago that was really addressing fans and talking about his love for the city, his love for the sport, and the personal investment he was going to make in privately financing this this stadium in the middle of downtown Chicago. >> Amazing. And you and I know like both from the UK, there's something so special about football or football as we would say as soccer fans. Like there just something so unique about that fandom. >> Yeah. >> And I think something that unites you all that you've all touched on is this idea of like moving beyond passive audiences and really interacting with people who are engaging with each of your brands. Jason, how are you doing that at Hasbro? Like can you share some examples of that in action? >> Yeah, I I think it's it's interesting like listening to talking to Dan earlier about kind of sports and you know he talked about two to 100. you know, we're we're not that different, right? We have audiences of all ages. And when I said earlier about kind of the proliferation of communities, that also actually means that communities are getting smaller and more bespoke. I'm sure Twitch you see this all the time. And so, in the past, right, in way back when in the 1990s, so to speak, you do the one to many, you do the broad reach, and you're most likely able to reach everyone you need to reach in that sense. I think those days largely are gone. And so as you think about the proliferation of communities and a frag the micro fragmentation if you will whether you're 5 years old today and you know if you we do we talk to kids that are five six seven years old you know with their parents and their parents are usually stunned at how their kids are getting information today whether they should be or not on certain platforms but the reality is they talk to their friends they look at creators and those communities start to fragment out and these are not you know the Mr. beasts of the world, right? These are folks that have a thousand followers, 2,000 followers, but they have those followers that really listen and kind of adhere to things like recommendations. So, as we think about that as the marketing side, the those communities for Nopoly are very different than community for Transformer are very different than community for Magic are very different for the community for our video games. And so marketing as an organization and Hasbro hasn't really done this historically. I'd say mostly marketing at Hasbro from an execution standpoint has been mediabased and that's still important as a muscle but over the last couple years I think since I've been there we've really adjusted to be more about creator programs influencer raising the bar on our own creativity and then really thinking hard about how we get insights. So I guess the last part of the you know the answer to your question would be uh you know insights for us today you know and you think about hey like kids are on YouTube like that's that's not an insight that's just fact insights are more around hey uh teenagers now 14 to 18 are using chat on in or on Snapchat rather uh and we chat to basically send their friends specific snippets of a specific creator in a specific country that's not even where they're vakes and we see this in places like Germany, we see this in places like the UK. Uh, and so as a marketing engine, like you have to be able to activate that in some way. So what we're really finding is we have to be both bespoke, but then we also have to scale, right? So we're not a huge organization. We're about 180 some odd people uh at a company of Hasbro size, which is which is about right. But that's really kind of where we're trying to lean in these days, which is both from a partner perspective, like how do we scale through partners? And we do that with Disney and most recently with Netflix on K-pop. But we also scale through partners like Magic the Gathering. We just did a Final Fantasy collaboration this year. Really appealing to those audiences in very very authentic ways. So that's also something we're thinking about from a marketing standpoint is how we get to scale through partners which is super important. >> Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit more about that too. But Rachel, you mentioned some examples um you know of how Twitch is involving players in its marketing and these interactive experiences. But one of the interesting things I think you do as a digital brand is you host real world events too. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Yeah, of course. So TwitchCon is our marquee event. Um we bring together tens of thousands of people across two events, one in Europe, one in one in um the US. We just had it in San Diego. I hope someone in the audience was in attendance. >> Um and again, it just really speaks to our mission, which is building community, building a sense of belonging. And I think people are one in terms of insights. Like we spent a lot of time together on the internet. I think that consumers have really wisened up to the fact that it isn't always the best way to be spending our time and so live um they're really craving right live interactions as a way to not replace necessarily but to complement you know the community and the connection that they're building online and so you know we find that bringing people together live whether it's through our big you know TwitchCons where we've got Magic the Gathering D&D like anything that's on Twitch is at TwitchCon [snorts] um but also in smaller venues so we have meetups organizations we have um you know we end up at third party events of course but the the idea is always to be driving connection and to be driving community between our viewers between our creators. >> Yeah. Whether that's in real life like our own sweat. >> Correct. Yeah. >> And then yes we have these we build community online as well. So we we are heavy users of discord um as well as our own you know service to to make sure that people are regularly networking that providing insights. But I think also just importantly um being able to chat with people and hang out and get and get some sense of support recognition. >> Yeah. And Dan, you know, you're doing this in a few different ways too and some of them are quite grassroots and like at local level. Can you talk about that? >> Yeah. I mean, I think when we think about participation and how we're driving it within the club, there's really two parts of it. One part is the sport and how we're driving participation in the sport and then one part is the club and the brand and how we're driving participation. Kind of more similar to what you guys are talking about there. from a participation in sports. So soccer is I mean the the cultural role that soccer plays in the US isn't quite reflective of the amount of participation that soccer as a sport has. It's the only team sport that's grown postco from participation for youths. We have uh two we have an entire physical facility called the Endeavor Health Fire Pitch. We have 365 programming year round. We actually run the Midwest's biggest indoor soccer league. We have 50,000 people from again from two to I'd say 60, but you can play over 60 if you want to that come and do camps, clinics, leagues. I actually played yesterday. So if you see me limping off the stage, that's why I'm getting a little too old for it. But really, really try to try to drive participation at that kind of youth level and adult level knowing that that is a gateway drug then into fandom of the sport. And from a brand perspective, it's equally important. Yeah, I think we think a lot about soccer is so the culture behind soccer in America is so different than the other sports. We have supporters groups who have permission to bring in instruments and banners and really impact game day experiences. And so in soccer, you really have to work with them, which from a marketing perspective is really around training your team. Yes, we need to do this stuff. You need to keep your eyes open for it. We need to be able to enact on it quickly. I think a few things that come to mind for me, we've done recently. We we as a club hadn't made the playoffs for seven years. We just made it this year. Unfortunately, we got knocked out on Saturday, so we don't need to spend too much time thinking about it. But we had a fan at the start of the year who tweeted, "If the Fire make the playoffs this year, I'm going to shave my head bold." And so, our social team held him to his word. First playoff game we had about two weeks ago. We got him out on the pitch right before the players came out and shaved his head live on the pitch before. >> And then our supporters groups, um, they wanted to do a fundraiser for the Greater Chicago Food Depository. For anyone who's been to Chicago, we have this horrible shot called Mealort. I don't know if anyone's had it. >> No, it tastes like petrol, gasoline. It's It's horrible. Um, our supporters decided they wanted to do a 5K with a shot of Mealort at the end to celebrate. So, we give them the physical space. We like, we really make sure that we're doing the things as a club that feels very grassrooty and small, but then you do the brand storytelling around it to let folks know this is what community looks like. This is what club looks like. So take all of your sort of taking these fan moments and like translating them into marketing campaigns. I know Jason, you mentioned this earlier, but naturally other brands gravitate towards your brands and you know want to work in partnership because of the audiences that you each have. Um we're going to have a quick video here from from Hasbro if my clicker works. But Jason, can you talk a little bit about like what successful partnerships look like for you and some of the ones you've been working on? You mentioned K-pop there. Like well done for jumping on that hype. >> Yeah. No, no. I Yeah. And I think historically, right, we're not super unique in this. I mean we're we certainly are a licensor and l eee um so Disney for example has been a partner um with Hasbro for 50 plus years for Star Wars and Marvel and that will continue K-pop is something we recently uh won alongside with Mattel uh for their toy line and that's those things are still super important and then and then for us in as much as those are not technically our own IP we certainly treat them as such and it's really again about bringing to life that IP to to you know fans of all ages and So, I think that that kind of partnership will still persist in really positive ways. But the other part of it, I mentioned Magic and Final Fantasy. So, there's this thing that we've been doing with Magic the Gathering. And for those that don't know what it is, well, I'll let you Google it and uh it's probably easier to spend a couple hours on that, but it's actually one of the biggest brands out there in tabletop gaming. It's um the marketing challenge on that for us is how do you grow that and not you know completely alienate a core which um Twitch certainly knows much about but we have this thing called universes beyond which was a way to introduce the game to a different set of players which basically means we're partnering with similar brands but it's not just partnership or sorry not just sponsorship andor kind of logo slapping it's really about integrating those brands into the game. So, our biggest this year was with Final Fantasy, which is a video game out of Square Enix based in Japan. And we were super authentic to that brand. Um, the cards that we built were with Square Enix artists rather. Um, these are folks that have worked on this IP for 30 plus years and their fans have never actually seen their actual artwork appear in static form outside of the video game. And so we were both creating opportunity for those fans to engage with Magic, which they have never done, but it allows our own Magic players who are incredibly passionate about that brand, to also cross over into another way to play the game and and start to get exposed to different IP. And I think our ability to scale, and I don't think we're alone in this, but our ability to scale really does have to come through partners. We activate better through partners as long as we stay authentic. Um, and I think that's something that our our communities, right, will hold us accountable to, which is if we're just doing it for the heck of doing it, like that's not going to work super well. And so that's something you should expect to see more from more of us, which is how we find those authentic partnerships to scale our own brands. So >> definitely. And um, Rachel, I think Twitch has some really nice examples of partnership and one of them was the glitch that you done, Door Dash. I think we've got a little video we can play or little still that we can show people that in motion. talk to me about that. >> Sure. So, um, many of you will have heard he heard of Fortnite. Of course, Fortnite is not just a game, right, the battle royale, of course, that many people know, but it's also a suite of experiences now, right? It's a platform. So, um, we worked with a really great studio. We built the Glitch, which was a, um, a map, right, a Fortnite map, and brought in some really cool partners, Door Dash being one of them, and so built this really compelling experience, which is first and foremost, it's a fun game to play. That's so important, right? particularly when you're talking to a gamer demographic, like there are really high standards, right? In terms of how they want to spend their time, how it works, what are the mechanics, all of those things. >> Um, and then integrating brands in ways that feel natural, but also are really rewarding. So, we worked with Door Dash, built branded experiences. They're integrated into this map on Fortnite that we have called the Glitch. And then we did tournaments, so like Battle of the Brands where there was like, you know, $20,000 prize pools for viewers. And it's something that's, you know, months, right? It's not that it's a weekend long or or even, you know, a couple weeks. It's it's months and months of content and keeps people really engaged. And I think we sell around 50 million, right? Like people actually playing playing the experience. And so I think for us um you talk about scale through partners and I think partners is one way for us, but we really achieve scale together through creators. So how do we create things that our audience, most of whom I don't know what it is, 99.9% of people who are on Twitch, they're on other places and they're active in terms of content creation. They're sharing clips. They're sharing their reactions. And so how do we create something that's so exciting, so compelling that they want to share it? >> Did anything surprise you about the way that your audiences like interacted with that partnership and that campaign? >> I think the you know surprising in that I don't think that there was like um resistance, right, of like oh it's something that Twitch built or something that a brand build. It was like is it fun? Yeah. >> Is it is it good? Is it fun? Do I enjoy what I'm doing? That's really the barrier to entry. >> Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. And Dan, you know, you're doing some stuff sort of at the intersection of like music, sport, and culture on the the partnerships front. You guys hosted a series of gigs recently, right? >> Yeah. So, in sports, it's funny, partnerships are a little bit different. Partnerships for us are largely sponsorships. So, it's a revenue model just purely in its own right, how we sell access to our fan base and to our audience, to to partners, sponsors. But one thing we're always looking for, some sponsorships obviously are just you put the logo up. Um, it's kind of subtractive from the energy of an experience rather than additive. And increasingly we're looking at, hey, how do we find additive partnerships where the partner comes in, does something that makes experiences better for our fan base, and we get paid for for providing that. Probably my favorite example this year is we had a a partner come to us, really wanted to find a way to play in that intersection of sport and music. And so we started a summer concert series where after two games this year, we set up a stage behind one of the goals. 30 minutes after the game finished, we're pulling the goals out. We're getting fans down on the field. We had Chance the Rapper and then a guy called Danny Lux who's a big kind of Mexican singer singer songwriter. Um we had crowds come out for that all sponsored by Cafe Bello. So they really got to inject their brand into that intersection between sports and music but in a way that actually benefited our brand and kind of moved us forwards culturally as well. >> Yeah. It kind of goes back to what Rachel was saying, you know, like many of Twitch's users are also across other platforms like 99.9%. So many of your audience will also be interested in music. So the two intersect. So love that. And something that's come up as well is this idea of like play across generations. So whether that's like me introducing my little boy to hungry hippos or like Rachel, your family playing a lot of Magic the Gathering from the sound of things or you know creators like bridging that gap on Twitch. And I want to know how you're all marketing across the generations. Like Dan, you mentioned, you know, your fans could be like age 2 to 60 and they can play in the games and things like that. So, can you talk to me a little bit about how you're thinking about that? >> Yeah, I mean, the way we think about about youth especially and and Gen Alpha is is participation, right? So, it's getting them playing soccer, it's finding if they we have something called little sparks, which is I think it's 18month-olds running around playing. It's it's not soccer is is chaos to be honest. Um but we have that um all the way up to formal pathways through the academy to get into the first team for kids. Um and so we really talk to the parents about the benefits um you know physically, emotionally um all of that that that comes with with participating in soccer. And then when it comes to game days, it's really and game days and I guess non-game days around around players and brand. It's really around the access that you can give the kids. And soccer's it's different than other American sports in the sense that there's less stop start, right? you got 45 minutes of play, 15 minutes break, 45 minutes of play, but if you come to a game day, we find so many opportunities to get kids down on the pitch. So, we have um like kids walk out with with players for the national anthem. We had a kid that did it this year, this uh past weekend, we just played on Saturday and he wouldn't stop talking about how amazing it was. And this kid, he's four years old. The the shorts that we gave him, they came down honestly halfway down his shins, his shirts almost covering his knees. It was the best day of this kid's life that he got to walk out with our striker. He'll never forget that. He >> He'll never forget it. And we do, we have one of our partners is Lumatis, the pizza company. They put a pizza tarp on the center circle at halftime. We get parents ringing us asking how their kid can carry that out and spin a pizza on the center circle at halftime. So, it's all just about finding ways to give access to the players to the game day experience and give kids and then ultimately their parents experiences that that they'll treasure. >> Cuz if a kid wants to go back to the game, their parents are definitely buying tickets, right? >> 100%. And Rachel, how are you thinking about like cross generational play at Twitch? I imagine your audience is, you know, very varied, but as you think about those younger viewers and and how, you know, yeah, we're 70% Gen Z and millennials, so we have a rather um young demographically speaking. I think, you know, for us, when people actually come into content creation, when they're thinking about, do I want to be a content creator, which increasingly many young people, you know, it is one of the most aspirational jobs, right, for young people. Um, how do we make sure we stay top of mind? And again, that that kind of scales through us comes through creators, right? Because ultimately, they're not going to necessarily be inspired because like Twitch told them that there's like incredible opportunity, although we do say that. Um, but rather like how do we make sure we're boosting profiling and showing what the real advantages of are building a long-term loyal fan base on Twitch versus, you know, something else that might be more transient. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then I think in terms of intergenerational, this happens to my own home is games, gaming, music, whatever it is on Twitch, like they can be really a point of connection. We have really good examples and fun examples of there's a woman called I love puzzles who does, you know, puzzles on Twitch. She's a, you know, senior, right? More more older in terms of the typical demographic. And then we have a lot of parents who are like, I started streaming, I started gaming because I want to have uh shared interests with my child and I it turns out I really liked it. >> Yeah. So, we try to highlight a lot of those stories, too, because it certainly is something that, you know, I think the idea of fun, the idea of play, the idea of connection, those are universal appeal, whether you're, you know, got a full-time job or or not. >> Yeah. Amazing. And Jason, you know, as we mentioned earlier, you've got so many IPs across, you know, physical and digital, like how are you marketing cross generation generationally and the younger younger demographic coming up? >> Yeah, I think it's I mean, it builds on, I think, a lot of the points made. We definitely have to be cognizant of the fact that at the end of the day the best thing for our brands is that that that toy that game is in the hands of the consumer. Um I think not or not unlike many other brands out there we are very much more adopting this notion of hey our job is to curate and facilitate those those access points. Our fans and and consumers will take it from there. Uh I think we have to remember as marketers that while yes we want to be a demand genen driver and yes we have accountability certainly to growing sales that is very much ingrained in me every day by our CEO uh at the same time we're a storytelling function and I think at least in the space that we play if we forget that we're a storytelling function and we actually don't give our fans something to be proud of right if you're a Magic the Gathering player you want to be proud of the brand you want to see the company that actually delivers that to you. Be proud and celebrate your passion and stop selling them stuff basically. Uh and so as we think about ages honestly like whether you're you know a young kid or a teenager adult etc. Um we're seeing more and more similarities with how those with how those communities engage. And so again I think implications from a marketing standpoint is going back to that do you really understand what they want and are doing with your brand? Are you able to facilitate and engage them in the places that they live? Twitch certainly being one of them. Sports teams certainly being another. And then ultimately, what action do you want them to take? Uh, and that's something that I think as marketers we're constantly wrestling with. So, >> yeah. Amazing. And just quickly, because we're running out of time now, but we look, you know, 12 to 24 months ahead, what's next for fan engagement and play? Dan, I want to start with you because you mentioned it already, something very exciting, new stadium. Talk to me about that. >> Yeah. Um, so new stadium on the horizon, opening 2028, downtown Chicago. Couldn't be a better location. Right on the river. Super excited about that and just how it's going to help us realize our vision of trying to be a world-class club. And then before then, hopefully you all know the World Cup's coming to America next summer. It's going to be a massive, massive summer of football, soccer in the US. And so really thinking about how do we uh invest in that and and really engage fans as there's this ground swell of interest in the sport. >> Yeah, exciting times. and Rachel and Jason as you guys look to 2026 what are you thinking about like what's top of mind Rachel I'll start with you >> yeah I think for a long time we've been a place that was a gathering place for fans right the third place the fourth place like where people were coming together share their passions grow community all of those things and increasingly one of the ways we've been really trying to operate differently is the brand as a fan so we're not just the ingress point right or the playground as we used to sort of think about ourselves we're actually in the fandom and more in the crowd. And so for us that means how how do we show up and be in chat more? How are we in the stadiums? Um how can we show up and be, you know, a little bit more equal with the fans and demonstrate our own fandom? I suspect we'll see more and more, you know, brands sort of um embrace this idea of being the fan of your consumers. >> Yeah, I love that. >> Yeah. And Jason, what about you? >> Yeah, I think for us it's really simple. Next year is our first step out the door with our own video games. Um, and so as we expand a company's kind of reach and a different styles of play, we're super excited about actually delivering for the first time our first video game later next year. >> More details to come. >> Watch the Game Awards on December 11th. You'll see more from us then. >> It's amazing. Well, thank you all so much and thank you for listening. >> Great. >> Thank you. Kiki, >> that was a conversation recorded live at an AdWeek event. You can find more coverage, analysis, and interviews from across the marketing and media world at adweek.com. Thanks for listening to Adspeak. If you like the show, be sure to follow or subscribe [music] wherever you get your podcasts.