The View from the Office.

I met up with Max Albert, the CEO of Adrenaline Interactive, at the office of Bulletpitch in Tribeca. 

Max went from University of Michigan student to CEO in five years by pursuing a passion for gaming.

He won a scholarship to play the video game Hearthstone at Michigan and captained the team to a national championship. (Since it was administered by the athletic department, he was required to work out like other athletes.)

After graduating in 2019, Max worked at Ford as a software engineer while  programming mobile games on weekends. His first hit was an NFL sports game called Deep Pass Jam made with NFL players that reached 500,000 players and was among the top 100 mobile games in March 2022.

After being approached by advertisers who wanted to insert “disruptive” video ads he got interested in making better in-game brand ads.

He launched Adrenaline in January 2024 with co-founder Shawn Walter, who previously directed programmatic advertising for Nike.

The big unlock versus existing agencies that sell ads to video gaming platforms was that Adrenaline offers a programmatic solution. 

Essentially, the company uses AI to help advertisers such as Sargento cheese insert product images into games like Fortnite without requiring expensive custom-built studio work.

The ads use the imagery from media kits and are programmatically assigned to appear on surfaces like walls or character skins. 

It follows a similar trajectory we’ve seen for years in TV and movies where companies pay for a character to drive a Lexus or drink a Coke.

Now, however, the ads can be easily made and hyper targeted, with different ads appearing to varying audiences.

The company works primarily with “user-generated content” games within platforms like Fortnite, targeting studios that create games like “Box 3v3” which has 250,000 daily players.

Adrenaline takes a 30% commission from advertisers, with 70% going to the game studios. 

Max is based in Austin but travels frequently to New York and elsewhere. 

If you want to connect you can find him on LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.