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Why now
If your edge is anything a machine can copy, it isn’t an edge anymore.
If your edge is knowing things, the machines already know more. If it’s being available, they never sleep. If it’s producing content, they do it endlessly and for free. Fast, cheap, informed: they win all of those now. Take away everything a machine can do, and one thing is left standing that they can’t fake: people who actually care whether you exist. Not the content you put out, but the relationship behind it. That’s the ground a fandom grows from, and in a world automating everything else, it’s the last advantage that’s still yours.
Where this came from
The people behind the biggest fandoms don’t have famous names.
They built the systems. For over a decade that was my job, inside Blizzard and Amazon: the marketing and community machines behind World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and the rebrand of Twitch Prime into Prime Gaming. Not by growing an audience of my own, but by building the structure that turned massive audiences into something that stayed.
The pattern held at every scale and every budget. The brands that lasted built attachment on purpose, as a system; the ones that didn’t kept buying campaigns that spiked and faded. The Emotion Engine is that pattern, distilled so you can run it without a billion-dollar franchise behind you.
This page is popping the hood.
What the industry says
The people who worked with me say it better.
I’ve been privileged to be able to work directly with Otavio over the years to set a standard in social media content, both at Blizzard and in the games industry at large. Otavio’s willingness to test new platforms and take calculated risks, and his ability to understand his team and leverage their strengths, is a unique skill I’ve not seen much anywhere else. Otavio is also an amazing storyteller, with the ability to obtain buy-in from all manner of stakeholders.
Jesse P.
Krafton
The Builder of Worlds — structure and processes; a treasure trove of entertainment knowledge. Otavio has been special in my own career, as our successes were intertwined by the campaigns and platforms we built together, and those he built for me — oftentimes the silent mastermind who goes unaccredited. He is the person who will find the team and partner you need, and if they don’t exist, will actually work with the options he has available to build you one. He is also the person who, after creating those teams, keeps them together behind the scenes, with vast experience in both good and trying times.
Antonio H.
Bandai Namco
Otavio was always a highly trusted colleague — his ability to turn even the vaguest of brand marketing’s crazy ideas into functional, real, and trackable executions is second to none. He is organized, practical, and driven — but add in years of content marketing experience, a massive mental database of pop culture and the entertainment industry, a willingness to push the envelope, and a can-do attitude. You have in Otavio one of the best resources a cutting-edge marketing team could wish for. He is Scotty to the Enterprise, and he ALWAYS has a solution.
Jon B.
Riot Games
Otavio was always at the forefront of innovative ideas, always bringing something unique to our brainstorm sessions and challenging outdated processes that were sometimes only being followed because “that was how it had been done.” Many of his ideas and process revisions were so successful that they ended up being adopted by several other teams across markets. And beyond his expertise and professional savviness, he is also a very pleasant individual to work with. I’ve seen him deal with some really stressful situations with the calmness and poise that is truly commendable. His ability to see things rationally and be driven by data really leveraged our team’s ability to focus on the most impactful initiatives. What a journey it has been working with Otavio.
Washington A.
Activision Blizzard King
Where this leads
Some customers buy.
Some stay. Some carry you.
Buy once
Stick around
Recommend you
Defend you
Carry you
Most people spend years trying to get customers and almost no time on why some stay and others vanish. Some buy once and disappear. Some stick around a while. Some recommend you to a friend. Some defend you when a stranger talks shit. And some become the reason new people show up without you chasing them.
The ones that compound aren’t the ones with the most customers — they’re the ones with the most of that last group. Retention gets cheaper, referrals climb, pricing power grows, and the whole thing gets sturdier instead of more fragile. It stops being a treadmill and starts being something you own.
That’s the destination. The diagnostic just tells you where on the climb — audience, to community, to fandom — yours is stuck.
Proof
It works for people who aren’t me.
Otavio has clear steps for what needs to be done to help me start my own online business, and has given me great feedback on the ideas I already had. His advice is really helping me have clearer direction on where to focus my efforts and not be so all over the place with my ideas or next steps. I look forward to continuing to work with him.
Joaquin M.
Spain
What stood out most to me was that he didn’t try to impose a generic “growth creator” mindset on my work. Instead, he spent real time understanding my existing storytelling instincts and helped translate them into a more structured and repeatable creative system. His feedback was thoughtful, nuanced, and surprisingly personal to the actual material I shared with him. The framework he introduced — around essay structure, psychological tension, and content extraction — genuinely gave me new ways to think about my YouTube work. In particular, his ability to identify the gap between fascination and finding the right angle for a video was incredibly insightful and accurate to my creative process. I think creators interested in thoughtful long-form storytelling would benefit a lot from working with him.
Ertunç E.
Turkey
Otavio understood what I was trying to achieve right away and gave me specific guidance to help me out of my analysis paralysis. With a clear path broken down into short, actionable steps, we could express our brand in the best way possible on our event tour, creating a much larger relationship with our fanbase.
Kenzo H.
Japan
I was stuck working on a pitch for my podcast series, and Otavio helped me unlock it almost immediately. I gave him a bunch of disconnected lists of wishes, dreams, data, goals, and other napkin notes, and he was able to read through all that noise and create a cohesive document that was business-savvy and 100% me.
Chris W.
USA
See the thinking
Don’t take my word for the method. Read it.
The whole framework is written up in a short primer: the five gears, why the order is the point, and the thinking underneath the diagnostic. Read it first, then decide if you want to know which gear is yours.
Where to start
Start free. Go as deep as you want.
Every rung runs on the same engine — the only thing that changes is how much help you want. Start wherever you are.
Find which of your five gears is stuck. Three minutes, fifteen questions.
Score all five gears and three stages, with the contradictions surfaced — instant.
Run the engine yourself, all year — re-measure, fix your gear, watch the curve compound. Not a one-time read; the whole ongoing loop.
Ninety days with me in your corner — the plan rebuilt at 30, 60, and 90 days.
One-on-one and real-time, for established businesses ready to break a plateau.
Want the detail on each? See how we can work together →
Questions
Before you start, the obvious ones.
Rather skip the diagnostic and just tell me what’s going on? Send a message →
I read every one and reply within 48 hours.