Brands turn to Discord servers as a means to reach niche influencer channels in their own ‘communities’

As Discord steps up its pitch to advertisers, brands are increasingly approaching the platform as an influencer marketing play, sponsoring niche Discord servers to reach particularly engaged consumers.

To make it easier on marketers, Discord launched its first homegrown advertising product, Quests, in March 2024 worldwide. Since then, the ad offering — which rewards users with on-platform benefits like stickers and badges for watching videos or performing other promotional tasks — has largely been the territory of gaming and entertainment brands like “Call of Duty” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.” Discord has confirmed that it is starting to open Quests to a more diverse range of mainstream brands, having recently run Quests with advertisers like Uber and Wendy’s.

In lieu of Quests, some mainstream advertisers are finding other ways to leverage Discord as a marketing channel. Brands like Jack in the Box, Samsung, Netflix and Mentos have instead spent the last year partnering directly with server owners on Discord, paying them to share promotional links and content across digital communities that sometimes boast over 100,000 individual users. For its June campaign, for example, Jack in the Box collaborated with the agency Wildfire to sponsor a network of servers including NA Practice Scrims, a Fortnite community on Discord with roughly 114,000 members. The goal was to drive attention and engagement toward a sponsored livestream with Faheed “T-Pain” Najm on June 26. 

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