World of Warcraft taught me marketing

Not university. Not courses. Not even the first years of agency work.

Between 2005 and around 2009 I spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft. Raids, guild organization, assigning roles, trying to achieve objectives that were impossible without coordination. You learn something very quickly in that environment: everyone cannot do everything.

You need tanks. You need healers. You need DPS. If roles aren’t clear, the whole raid collapses.

When I started directing music videos and working on bigger productions, I saw the same pattern. Pre-production, production, post-production. Different teams, different responsibilities. When the strategy and the creative idea were clear, and everyone understood their role, everything moved smoothly.

Marketing campaigns today feel very similar.

Strategy is the raid plan. Creative direction is the boss you're trying to defeat and the mechanics you need to win.

Content, distribution, analytics and production are the roles inside the team. If everyone understands the objective and their responsibility, the campaign flows. If not, it becomes chaos very quickly.

Funny how many management lessons you can learn in a fantasy world.

Originally published: LinkedIn, March 2026