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Your Brand Amplified

Bridging Worlds: Cinema, Community and The Power of VR with Athena Demos and Doug Jacobson

Your Brand Amplified

Bleav + Anika Jackson

Management, Entrepreneur, Public Relations, Entrepreneurship, Small Business, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Business Trends, Ai, Women-owned, Business, Sales Strategy, Artificial Intelligence, Sales, Social Media, Branding, Podcast, Communications

5.0132 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Athena Demos and Doug Jacobson showcase the power of immersive storytelling, community-building, and technological innovation, drawing deeply on their backgrounds in cinema and decades-long engagement with the Burning Man community. Recognizing that the traditional Burning Man experience was difficult to access for many due to logistical, financial, and physical barriers, they turned to emerging virtual reality platforms to democratize the experience. This shift not only bridged gaps for dispersed participants but fueled an evolution in how stories could be told—blending documentary filmmaking with interactive virtual environments, creating a new form of experiential narrative that allowed users to explore, discover, and participate regardless of their location or abilities.

Transcript

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0:00.0

So, and then we have documentaries telling the artists, telling their stories.

0:04.5

And so we're really leaning into the documentary aspect of it, along with the classic sort of

0:10.7

cartooning, 2D, 3D worlds and stuff that we had in all space, but they look nicer now.

0:15.9

So that's sort of what our philosophical change was.

0:19.4

So we're curating more. It's not and not as much

0:22.7

just a flood of random stuff from people. We're laying it out. And because we have our own

0:28.2

platform, we have a lot more control over interactability and things we can do because we're

0:33.7

in a game engine like Unity. And we we positioned ourselves because we both come from cinema.

0:40.9

We both come from the art of storytelling that when we built the platform, we were looking at a way of

0:49.7

how can we use this to tell stories.

0:53.5

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified,

0:57.3

the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses.

1:02.2

I'm your host, Onica Jackson,

1:04.1

and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets

1:08.2

that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success.

1:15.2

I am thrilled that I'm finally on the podcast with Athena and Doug.

1:21.2

I don't even know how many years it's been since I first met the two of you.

1:25.1

And we started working on some projects. And I think you actually were

1:29.7

doing a project that was in Chris Bradley, my partners, one of a demo he was making for a project

1:36.6

that he was doing. And then I was like, oh, I really want to meet them because I saw how cool

1:40.5

everything was. It was the futurist for that show that he was putting together.

1:49.4

And that was my first introduction to you. And then, of course, we worked together on some things for MLK, being in Hawaii. And I just have loved seeing the evolution of everything you're doing.

...

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