Pivoting Azarus.
The pivot from Twitch overlay to gamified ad platform. Ubisoft and Logitech at $2 CPI. $AZA listed on Coinbase and Crypto.com. Acquired by Animoca Brands in October 2023.
Engagement was proven. Monetization wasn’t. That was the pivot.
Engagement at scale. No monetization.
Azarus was a browser overlay on Twitch. The Streamer Awards had proved the engagement model worked. What it hadn’t solved was monetization: not for the company, the streamers running the overlay, or the brands trying to reach them. That was the pivot.
See the Streamer Awards case study
From overlay to gamified ad platform.
I led the team that reshaped Azarus as a gamified advertising format: brands buy CPI-priced engagement, not banner space. The repositioning landed in October 2022 as The Overlay Games™ Company, delivered by a team of 8 across brand, community, game design and comms.
Tested with streamers before any brand.
The format: a countdown to pull players in, three rounds of brand trivia, the brand ad, then players collect their winnings. Attention held to the last beat. That’s the value behind the CPI.
Before pitching brands, I stress-tested it through an Alpha and Beta with the always-on creator community, then shipped a fully-rendered mock campaign (Coca-Cola as visual shorthand) for the sales team to pitch with.
Ubisoft and Logitech, at $2 CPI.
Ubisoft built a campaign around a new Brawlhalla character (trivia, ad, winnings), live on Xenrichan. Logitech ran Black Friday, live on ElainaExe. Both streamed through the always-on creator program. Across both, we averaged $2 CPI: above industry, because engagement justified it.
$2 CPI
Averaged across Ubisoft and Logitech. Above industry.
From AZA Credits to $AZA crypto.
AZA Credits lived inside the overlay as an internal currency. We turned them into $AZA, routing every advertiser dollar across streamers, players, platform and a community treasury. Alignment, not just incentives. My part: branding, listings, comms and partner onboarding. $AZA went live on Coinbase and Crypto.com.
Animoca
Acquired by Animoca Brands in October 2023.
Where Azarus got to.
The platform reached this on Twitch through 2022, the year before the Animoca acquisition.
Source: Azarus internal, Twitch Tracker and Twitch Developer Analytics, 2023. Full-year 2022.
A consumer product, pivoted into a B2B business.
The engagement engine became a business investors would back, and buy.
Three repeatable principlesBuild community programs as testing infrastructure.
The always-on creator program doubled as the Alpha/Beta talent, then ran the brand campaigns live. Same investment, two returns.
Stress-test small before swinging big.
We proved the format with players before any brand saw it. By pitch time, it had already worked.
Brands want new ways to reach buyers.
Ubisoft and Logitech jumped at a fresh format. Premium pricing follows when engagement earns it.