Sara Wilson

Digital Content Strategist, Web3 Senior Marketer, Former Head of Lifestyle Partnerships, Facebook & Instagram

Sara Wilson

Digital Content Strategist, Web3 Senior Marketer, Former Head of Lifestyle Partnerships, Facebook & Instagram

Add to List Availability & Fees

Biography

Sara Wilson is a digital content strategist focused on web3 communities and Gen Z consumption trends who works with brands, publishers and high-profile individuals to create and grow passionately devoted communities across digital channels. To do it, she leverages a unique combination of journalism and digital marketing skills honed during two decades working at some of the world’s leading publications and social platforms.

In addition to leading marketing for a web3 startup, Sara frequently speaks and leads workshops on the subject of "digital campfires" (a term she coined in the Harvard Business Review to describe the types of spaces young people are gathering in online today) to internal teams at brands and platforms around the world such as YouTube and Microsoft.

As the founder and principal of SW Projects (swprojects.co), Sara works in several different capacities. Currently, she is Interim Director of Marketing at tokenized entertainment platform Rove (roveworld.xyz), where she brings her knowledge of the web3 landscape together with her experience helping both traditional and digital-first brands like Nike, Birchbox, Bumble, the New York Times, National Geographic, Sony Pictures Television, Bustle, Playboy, Overheard LA, and several A-list celebrities reach audiences and build communities more effectively.

Prior to founding SW Projects, Sara ran lifestyle partnerships at Facebook & Instagram, served as an editor at The Huffington Post and Los Angeles magazine, and wrote for several leading publications, including the Economist, People magazine, and The Independent.

She has been featured as an authority on digital strategy in Forbes, Women's Wear Daily, Vogue, Fast Company, Stylus’ State of Media 2020 report, at SXSW, and on the Girlboss Radio podcast, among others. She has also written on the theme for MIT Sloan Management Review, AdAge and Quartz in addition to the Harvard Business Review.

Sara is also the creator and host of The Digital Campfire Download, a series where she interviews the entrepreneurial forces behind some of the hottest digital-first brands and platforms today.

Speaker Videos

Nike's acquisition of virtual collectibles company RTFKT

A New Framework for Building Intimacy With Your Audience

A New Framework for Building Customer Relationships

Speech Topics

The Rise of Web3 Digital Campfire Brands: What Marketers Need to Know

The rise of web3 has turned passive consumers into active investors. But successful web3 projects aren't simply investment vehicles, they're also strong communities--what speaker Sara Wilson calls digital campfires--that come with their own unique languages, iconographies, values and distinct subcultures. And perhaps most importantly, they imbue members with a deep sense of belonging. As these communities mature, hosting elaborate offline events, commerce operations, and rolling out tokenized economies of their own, they are defining what the next generation of brands look like. This talk will walk through the fundamentals of this new breed of web3 brand for marketers of all kinds, with the goal of helping them navigate the new landscape and build web3 strategies that integrate these new brand-building principles into their roadmaps authentically and effectively.

Digital Campfires: A New Framework for Building Intimacy With Your Audience

Audiences today, especially younger ones, are increasingly retreating from public-facing social platforms and flocking to smaller, more intimate online destinations such as Roblox, Discord, Twitch, Fortnite, and others. Digital strategist Sara Wilson calls these spaces digital campfires, a term she first coined in the Harvard Business Review, where she also detailed the ways that brands and platforms are experimenting with digital campfires as a means of building and fostering more intimate relationships with their audiences.

In the two years since Sara first introduced the term, digital campfires have become a force defining not only how audiences connect, but also how they experience and shape culture at large.

In this talk, Sara explains why brands and digital platforms can no longer afford not to pay attention to digital campfires, the ways your brand, organization or platform’s long-term survival may depend on them, and how to leverage a three-step digital campfire formula to find your people, create and stoke brand love, and build long-term trust.

Testimonials

"Sara gave our YouTube team an awesome glimpse into the world of digital campfires, sharing inspirational case studies and tactical guidance for how we can better connect with Gen Z in the places they naturally congregate. Feedback across the team was stellar!"

- Sara Pollack, Director, YouTube Brand Marketing