In 2019, Xbox’s Instagram feed went blank. More than 650 posts had been archived. For an account with an attentive gaming community, the absence itself became an event. Fans wondered whether something had gone wrong. Ayzenberg, working with Xbox on Gears 5, had given them a mystery.
- Ayzenberg turns audience knowledge into campaigns, trailers, social content, and creator partnerships.
- Gaming is its deep specialty; technology and other consumer brands also hire it.
- Its measurement tools attach an estimated media value to attention. That number needs context.
The feed returned as a puzzle: fragments of the game’s opening, clues, and a hidden video payoff. The campaign’s award entry reported 4.6 million video views across 27 Instagram pieces. Those figures describe attention, rather than proving sales. But the creative mechanism is revealing. The agency understood what this particular audience would notice, and gave it something worth investigating.
01 Fewer posts. More reasons to care.
There is an earlier clue to Ayzenberg’s approach. In 2014, it worked with Xbox to change the brand’s Instagram output, emphasizing fewer, stronger images. The submission to the Shorty Awards reported follower growth above 200 percent. A Forza-inspired controller became a particularly popular post. The lesson was specific to a visual platform: a familiar object, presented with care, could be more interesting than another announcement.
Consider the later campaign for Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege X. Ayzenberg traveled to record gamers, professional players, and streamers. Their experiences and gameplay became more than 30 trailers in multiple languages. The agency reported longer viewing than for conventional ads, without publishing a numerical lift. Its useful production choice was to let people who understood the game supply the material. Expertise was part of the performance.
02 The trailer is only the beginning
Eric Ayzenberg founded the agency in 1993, after working at companies including R/GA and Chiat/Day. His biography describes an early interest in web technology. By 1997, the company was building its own website and extranet, along with portals for gaming clients. Social and mobile got a division in 2007; the influencer network ION followed in 2011. Each addition brought another part of brand communication inside the business.
The business also serves clients across regions. Its contact page lists Seattle, London, Hamburg, and Beijing alongside Pasadena. For a publisher releasing a game internationally, geography becomes part of production: languages, local audiences, and channels complicate a single campaign brief. The Siege X trailers provide a visible example of that workload. A global launch needs material that can travel while preserving what players recognize about the game.
Today, a client can buy strategy, identity, creative production, social management, influencer work, and media services. Xbox Game Pass offers a concrete example. Ayzenberg worked on its launch branding in 2017 and describes ongoing production running to thousands of social assets a year. It has also made larger productions with Danny McBride. The same relationship can require a visual identity, a commercial, and tomorrow’s post.
For a technology company, the assignment can be explanatory. Ayzenberg’s portfolio includes short Microsoft Edge spots designed to make browser features relatable, along with Surface documentaries and HoloLens launch work. These are different storytelling tasks from teasing a game. The common problem is deciding which part of a complicated product a person can understand, remember, and discuss after a brief encounter.
ION adds creator strategy and matchmaking. The wider portfolio includes Microsoft technology work and Netflix Games campaigns. This puts Ayzenberg between entertainment production, integrated advertising, and social marketing. A buyer choosing it is choosing those disciplines together. A team needing only a trailer, or only social analytics, has a narrower purchasing decision.
“We listen. We create. We share.”Ayzenberg’s three-part operating philosophy
03 Putting a price on the conversation
Creative work produces a second question: what was the response worth? Ayzenberg’s Social Index supplies benchmarks for earned media value, or EMV. Later Influence documents how it uses the index: volumes of interactions are multiplied by assigned values to estimate advertising-equivalent exposure. A comment and an impression are different inputs. The dollar result is a measurement convention, rather than money arriving in a bank account.
EMV is an estimate. Sales need their own evidence.
The product also creates a different business from agency commissions. Its public monthly plans list Basic at $750 and Pro at $1,500, checked in October 2026. Enterprise work includes custom models and data integrations. Buyers can subscribe to measurement without commissioning a campaign. For an agency’s prospective client, that is a useful distinction: the software price is a defined product price, not a quote for creative services.
In August 2026, Social Index announced coverage of 15 platforms, adding Bluesky, Discord, Reddit, Threads, and WhatsApp. The company said it had delayed those additions while developing ways to value community and closed-network behavior. It also introduced brand-specific modeling using clients’ own performance data. A public-feed benchmark cannot simply be carried into a group conversation unchanged. The measurement has to follow the behavior.
04 The audience gets a digital counterpart
Ayzenberg’s audience technology has moved further upstream. Soulmates.ai now leads to Audience Council, which offers modeled audiences for testing ideas before spending on production or distribution. Its Brand Soulmates are built from real, consented participants; the vendor claims 93 percent fidelity. It separately describes Digital Twins as tools for directional learning, with no fidelity claim. That distinction matters. A modeled response can inform a decision without guaranteeing the real audience’s reaction.
05 Borrow the question, not the stunt
Ayzenberg describes its working culture in terms of listening, learning, and bringing disciplines together. There is a local expression of that ambition, too. Pasadena’s 2018 commendation recognized educational sessions, internships, and volunteer teaching. Its collaboration with Carnegie Mellon’s Arts Management & Technology Laboratory examined Gen Z’s expectations of authenticity in branded content. Audience understanding is an ongoing research problem.
The portable idea is to begin with an observation about people. Ask what they recognize, what they discuss, and what they would willingly investigate. Build a creative response, then choose a measure that matches the objective. An empty feed needs an audience that cares and a reveal that rewards its patience. For a little-known brand, silence may pass unnoticed. The thing to copy is the curiosity about the audience that made the silence legible.