Mike Monello

Mike Monello is one of the world’s leading practitioners of participatory storytelling. At Campfire, he leads the development of groundbreaking experiences for companies ranging from HBO, Amazon, and Netflix to Harley-Davidson and Infiniti. Campfire won an Ad Age Small Agency Campaign of the Year award in 2013 and in 2017 was nominated for an Emmy for creating Resistance Radio, a “pirate radio broadcast” for Amazon’s series The Man in the High Castle that became an online sensation. For HBO, Campfire created a live experience of the hit show Westworld at the 2017 Comic Con that included your choice of weapons as well as a personality assessment to determine if you should be given a white hat or a black hat. Entertainment Weekly called it “a delight — and almost too real.”

Monello is one of the entertainment world’s pioneers in immersive storytelling and innovative marketing. In the late 1990s, he and his partners at Haxan Films created The Blair Witch Project, a story told across the burgeoning internet. A Sci-Fi Channel pseudo-documentary accompanied by books, comics, games and a feature film, it became a pop-culture touchstone and inspired legions of “found-footage” movies in its wake. The Blair Witch Project forever changed how fans engage with story and how marketers approach the internet. Inspired by the possibilities for engaging connected fan cultures and communities online, Monello co-founded Campfire in 2006. In the years since, the agency has won top honors at the Cannes Lions, the Clios and the One Show.