The revolving door between Silicon Valley's social platforms continues to spin, and this week it deposited Christine Cassis at Twitch.
The Amazon-owned streaming service named Ms. Cassis as its new chief marketing officer on Tuesday, filling a position that had been vacant since January, when Rachel Delphin departed to become chief communications officer at Block. Ms. Cassis arrives with stops at Pinterest, Reddit, Google, and Shopify on her curriculum vitae — a career path that suggests she has spent nearly two decades learning how to explain online communities to people who do not belong to them.
The appointment comes as Twitch, which Amazon acquired in 2014 for $970 million (a sum that seemed extravagant at the time and now seems like a rounding error), attempts to broaden its appeal beyond the gaming audience that built it. The platform has been making noises about sports, music, and entertainment — categories that tend to attract the kind of advertising budgets that allow holding companies to meet their quarterly numbers.
Ms. Cassis, for her part, offered the sort of language that marketing executives offer when they arrive at new jobs. "While much of the web has shifted toward hyper-optimized, algorithmic feeds built for passive scrolling and digital isolation, Twitch is live, unscripted, participatory, and deeply human," she told Adweek. (What, you were expecting her to say, "I took the job for the stock options"?)
She outlined three priorities: championing the existing gaming community, closing what she called a "perception gap" among marketers who do not realize that Twitch hosts content beyond video games, and improving the platform's discovery tools. The middle item is the interesting one — it suggests that Twitch's sales team has been hearing the same objection in enough pitch meetings to make it a corporate priority.
Whether Ms. Cassis can persuade media buyers that Twitch belongs in their plans alongside more conventional live programming remains to be seen. But she has at least mastered the first requirement of the job, which is describing the platform in terms that sound like they belong on a conference stage.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Twitch Names Christine Cassis Chief Marketing Officer"