Speaker Bio
Luken is VP of Marketing for Candy Crush Saga at King, for the world-famous mobile title, working closely with his team to ensure that one of the world’s most successful games remains at the top of the charts by keeping players engaged and enthused.
With over 17 years of marketing experience in the entertainment and games industry, Luken previously led Ubisoft’s EMEA CRM across all console titles, including Assassin’s Creed and Just Dance, at a time when the industry saw a major shift from offline to online gaming.
Luken joined King in 2014, contributing to the build of King’s first CRM ecosystem, which enabled the business to start interacting with millions of players on a daily basis. After spending his first years within the business scaling CRM campaigns, Luken created a brand new ‘Live Marketing’ team which led on diversifying King’s existing technology to run exciting ‘in game’ events, collaborating closely with King’s product teams. Over the years these ‘in game’ events have grown in popularity and now include the Candy Crush ‘All Stars’ tournament, a much-loved addition to player experience.
As the VP of Marketing for Candy Crush Saga, Luken continues to seek new ways for King to surprise and delight its players and expand its audience. Whether that’s by amplifying the biggest in-game moments or delivering cutting edge marketing campaigns. Some examples include partnering with the Jonas Brothers to release new music exclusively in the Candy Crush app and securing a collaboration with the Barbie film franchise, to celebrate the release of the new movie in the game. He has a real passion for understanding player behavior and proven experience building expert teams that balance data driven strategies and intuition to execute creative campaigns with measurable impact.
In his freetime Luken is a big music fan, collecting House records from the 90s and early 2000s and has even had a stint as a DJ. Now he spends most of his time traveling with family and friends, preferably in a van!