Edition 120 is here, and this week, I’m exploring what Discord and Sony’s Resident Evil activations tell us about entertainment marketing, and why sometimes the Venn diagram of digital and in-person worlds is a circle.

Plus, some speed reads on music and sports:

Let’s go!

In 2022, I went to my first San Diego Comic-Con. The highlights for me were speaking to the cast of Rings of Power, Bill Nye singing me ‘Happy Birthday’, and the Severance activation.

Severance had recently debuted, and its activation was full of the actual props built and used in the series’ production. I sat at a Lumon desk, I enjoyed a ‘Music Dance Experience’, and got to be inside the world of the TV show I love. I still remember this experience and count it among one of the ultimate perks of my line of work.

These kinds of activations and experiences have been steadily growing in popularity not just as a nice-to-have add-on at an event like SDCC. They’re now part and parcel of content marketing strategies, a way to bring fans into the world and further solidify their love of a piece of IP.

So I wasn’t surprised when I saw that Discord and Sony Pictures have launched a Missions Quest campaign for Resident Evil, paired with a physical fan experience at SDCC.

It’s a natural fit for Discord’s Quests advertising format, usually confined entirely to the platform, to have a matching real-world activation to go with it. Fans who completed the mission on Discord earn rewards, while fans who showed up in person to Quartyard got an immersive version of the same story, built around trailer footage, exclusive content and merch.

This is a bigger story than ‘fun activation for superfans’. It’s about where gaming and social media platforms (because what is Discord, actually?) now sit in a studio's marketing calendar, and how critically it’s being ingrained in long-term strategy.

Discord was, historically, a social communication platform. But like most social platforms, it has grown into something much more than just a ‘space for nerds to chat’ (me, I’m the nerd).

It pulled in 64 million unique US visitors in April 2026 alone, a scale that puts a platform built for gamers firmly in the conversation for mainstream brand reach. Nearly half of US marketing professionals now see real value in rewarded advertising on community platforms like it, per Comscore data.

For marketers specifically, this is crucial. Discord's penetration among US adults aged 18-34 sat at 44% this year, with 61% of users in that bracket saying they trust brand communication on Discord more than the same brand's content on Instagram or TikTok.

That’s a big chunk of a core theatrical demographic, sitting inside a channel most studios still budget for as an afterthought. 

We flagged an early version of this gap in edition 85, arguing that gaming's "premium" price tags rarely matched its actual attention, using Medal's viewability and community data as the case study.

Sony buying into Discord is based on a similar argument: brands and IP holders are showing up there because it's genuinely where a huge, hard-to-reach audience already spends its time.

The bit that matters most for how you think about your own campaigns isn't just about the platform, though. It has to take into account the mechanic, too.

A Missions Quest isn't a video ad, and that’s what makes it different and resonant. It's a task you actively choose, in exchange for something you want. Discord reports a 96% median completion rate for Quests.

Incidentally, we spoke about this very subject with Banijay Entertainment’s Global Head of Branded Entertainment Business Development, Carlotta Rossi Spencer, who gives her expert insight into why this works in our latest episode of The Speakeasy!

But this isn’t really new-news. We wrote way back in edition 76, and again in edition 108, about how AI-generated fan content and UGC platforms mean fans no longer just watch IP, they build inside it, and that studios who don't show up in that participation get a version of their story they didn't shape.

Discord's own commentary backs this up from the platform side. Marketers there have said Gen Z users have started asking, unprompted, why they hadn't yet been served a Quest, posting about it on Reddit before Discord even built a dedicated home for browsing live campaigns. That's about as far from ad fatigue as marketing gets.

Measurement is catching up, too. Discord recently brought in third parties like AppsFlyer and Kantar to independently verify campaign outcomes, which is a sign the format is maturing. It’ll also give marketers comparable stats when pushing for Discord activations, making the sell that much easier.

→ Remember, eyeballs on your trailer are one thing, but the more cogent question is what a fan would have to do to earn early access to it. The mechanic itself becomes the marketing, and creates a much more lasting impact than a 30-second skippable ad spot.

The part of this campaign I loved the most, understandably, isn't the Discord Quest at all. It's that Sony and Discord built a matching physical experience and ran both at once, off the back of the same footage and story world.

We've talked before about the three layers that turn a cultural moment into something a brand actually owns:

1. A product experience

2. A digital experience

3. A life experience

These three things have to work together, rather than in isolation. In edition 118, I wrote about how a digital activation and a live one have to hand off to each other, creating an ecosystem of experience for fans.

That's the same shape here as what’s happening here: Discord is the digital layer, Quartyard is the life layer, and the film itself is the product.

San Diego Comic-Con isn't a small stage to test that on (I can tell you that from experience!); it's pulling in more than 150,000 attendees this year, with studios racing to out-activate one another across the Gaslamp Quarter. Disney alone has wrapped entire hotels and stadium exteriors for its slate this year. Standing out inside that requires more than a booth and a poster.

The timing is also interesting. Traditionally, we’re used to seeing Halloween tie-ins, easy wins for activations within the horror genre. For Resident Evil, though, this is a July campaign for a September release, and it's landing in a year where horror has quietly become one of the box office's most reliable genres, with several 2026 titles clearing the $200 million mark and the genre widely credited as a major driver behind cinema's best run since before the pandemic. (See, Backrooms!)

While this is amazing news for the box office and cinema in general, it also means competition is higher than ever. A single season tentpole event isn’t enough to create the kind of release-day run-up that it might have been.

What I take from this goes beyond Discord, Resident Evil, and even horror marketing specifically (though if you want a separately great playbook to follow for horror marketing, look to Neon!). It shows that the ‘window’ for entertainment marketing is getting bigger. With that increased window comes increased opportunity, but also more space to get things wrong or lose momentum. 

I have to admit that I’m not actually au fait with Resident Evil. In a way, though, this forced me to think more critically about the specific mechanic. Basically: does "complete a mission, earn a cosmetic reward" sit naturally next to a story about a viral outbreak and body horror? 

After some contemplation, I came to the conclusion that it does. Because actually, (as some googling helped me learn) Resident Evil is a survival-objective game before it's a horror film.

This fit won't hold for every IP a studio tries to push through the same strategy and platform. In Resident Evil’s case, the mechanic naturally matched the story. If you’re considering a similar style digital activation, the strategy is worth only as much as your IP fits the platform and mechanic, too. 

Studios and entertainment IP holders who understand this also understand that it goes beyond the one-off digital activation in the lead-up to your release. It has to extend to what your audience is doing on its random Tuesday night. And, in this case, they’re most likely on Discord. Why wouldn’t you be? 

The overhaul innovation changes the event’s broadcast, competition format, athlete experience and launches a new app.

TL:DR

Why you should care

I’m not a huge sports person (you may have picked up on this by now), so to me what was most interesting was the broadcast overhaul.

In a normal track meet, several things happen at once, and broadcasters constantly cut between them, so you may miss the moment you actually cared about. World Athletics has now changed a few things to fix this. 

Firstly, they’ve rebuilt the schedule itself so only one field event happens at a time, meaning each individual event can now have viewers’ full attention. A small tweak, but hugely valuable for the athletes, and sports, that tended to get less screen time.

They’ve also introduced live "who's likely to win" percentages on screen, a race clock that is repositioned specifically to work on vertical phone video, and a new app launching alongside the event, designed to be used all year, pulling live results, athlete stories, video and predictions into one place people open regularly.

And to round out with perhaps the most important change: athletes now own the rights to footage of themselves, and there's an official content-creator role built into the event.

Rugby sevens player Ilona Maher grew her own following to nearly five million by posting behind-the-scenes videos of herself at the Olympics, and by her own account, that's exactly what's pulled new fans into the sport. Tools built for this already exist and are already used across major sports, like Greenfly, which is used by leagues including the NHL, NBA and PGA Tour to get official footage into athletes' hands so they can post it themselves.

This is a model that federations with a much smaller budget could also realistically borrow, so I’m excited to follow along in September and report back!

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!