Every great story has a spark, a single moment that quietly sets the trajectory for everything that follows.
For Matchfire, that moment didn’t happen in a boardroom or at a pitch meeting. It happened in a modest office in San Luis Obispo, California, during an ordinary afternoon that turned out to be anything but. Chris Noble had flown down from Seattle to spend a few days with a new startup and a small team that had built itself around eBay charity auctions.
By the time Noble walked through that door, he’d built companies, sold some, and taken one public. He’d also learned what happens when things don’t go as planned, and that people matter more than ideas. The team in that room had something he recognized immediately—a daily commitment to doing things right.
What stood out wasn’t just capability. It was purpose. People cared about what they were putting into the world and who it was for. That kind of mindset is hard to build and even harder to fake.
Do good work. Make sure it matters.
What started as a small team running charity auctions on eBay, expanded and evolved, deepening its focus on growing impact with every step. Everything around them shifted; from the work, to the tools, and then the industry itself. The one thing that didn’t was the standard they held themselves to and their passion for purpose. Twenty-five years on, that standard has a tangible shape. Matchfire has helped raise over $250 million for charitable causes and built corporate purpose programs for some of the world’s most recognized brands. Plus, doing it all before “digital strategy” became a buzzword. It’s a story about how marketing, trust, and purpose have evolved together. For the people at Matchfire, there was never a tension between doing good and doing well. Those were always the same thing.
The Idea That Started Everything
The moment of clarity came during a campaign with Jay Leno. He had auctioned a celebrity-signed 2001 Harley-Davidson FXDL Dyna Low Rider to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina. The campaign raised well over $800,000. Leno didn’t take a fee. The charity kept the money. Everyone felt good. And then Noble looked at it from a different angle.
Matchfire was born from a simple but powerful observation that eBay, the internet’s great marketplace, could be turned into a force for charitable impact. Working at the intersection of brands, celebrities, and nonprofits, the early team discovered that auctions for signed guitars, private dinners, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences could raise serious money for serious causes. The model worked. But it was also, as Noble would come to see, leaving an enormous amount of value on the table.
“The insight,” Noble stated, “was that at the intersection of celebrity, brand, and nonprofit, there’s a whole lot of attention to be made, and we’re in an attention economy. If there’s that much attention available, then an agency can thrive there. And you get to do it while doing good.”
And with that, the foundation for Matchfire was built.
Two Founders. One Shared Conviction.
Joey Leslie’s path to Matchfire started with a strong understanding of online marketplaces. Early in his career, he became one of the top sellers on eBay, learning firsthand how timing, demand, and storytelling could increase value. Then he discovered that a small agency on California’s Central Coast was doing something similar, but in service of worthy causes. Soon after, he moved to SLO and joined their team.
When he and Noble acquired the company in 2008, they brought together different but complementary strengths. Noble focused on building a sustainable business model. Leslie understood how to use digital platforms to move people. Together, they arrived at the insight that would define the next two decades—brands were gaining so much value from the celebrity connection and the goodwill it generated that they were willing to invest in running these campaigns themselves. And when brands funded the work, nonprofits could keep all the funds they raised.
“From the beginning,” Leslie explains, “the idea was to create a vehicle that could help brands, nonprofits, and celebrities leave a meaningful dent in the world. Cause and marketing were never separate things to us. They were the same thing. The insight was simple, if you do good in the world, it can also be good for business. Supporting charities and causes doesn’t have to come at the expense of growth. It can actually drive it.”
That conviction wasn’t something the team just talked about. You could see it in how the people operated every day, from the decisions they made, the clients they chose, and the quality of the work they delivered. It was that visible, daily commitment that gave Noble and Leslie the confidence that they were building something lasting.
Why San Luis Obispo?
For an agency that has worked with brands like LG and Mastercard, and organizations like UNICEF and the United Nations, its location has always raised a natural question: why San Luis Obispo, instead of Los Angeles or San Francisco?
The answer is simple. Matchfire started in San Luis Obispo and chose to keep building from there, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions they ever made. Leslie says, “What we found over time is that SLO actually works really well for the kind of company we want to be. It attracts a specific type of person—people who are passionate about the work, who care about impact, and who aren’t just chasing the next step up a corporate ladder.”
That mindset shapes how people show up. In a place where lifestyle and values are prioritized, the work benefits. Cal Poly has provided a steady pipeline of talent, and the culture has helped Matchfire build a team that stays and grows together. In an industry often defined by turnover, that kind of stability stands out.
The Campaign That Revealed the Model
One of Matchfire’s turning points came through the Walter Sisulu Paediatric Cardiac Centre for Africa in Johannesburg—a clinic treating children with serious heart conditions. At the time, the clinic had no marketing budget and no clear path to the fundraising it needed. It did, however, have strong support from celebrities like Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, and Charlize Theron.
The clinic wanted to auction off experiences with these celebrities, but running a series of high-profile celebrity auctions would cost nearly as much as it would raise. The campaign had everything it needed to be successful—the story, the cause, and the people. The challenge was figuring out how to make it work.
As a solution, Matchfire packaged the three celebrity experiences into a single offering, named it Priceless Moments for South Africa, and pitched it to MasterCard, whose Priceless Moments campaign was already one of the most recognizable in the world. The partnership made sense. MasterCard funded the campaign. Matchfire did the work. The charity kept all the funds raised.
“That changed everything for us,” Noble shared. “We realized that brands were getting so much value from the visibility and goodwill of these campaigns that they would be willing to pay for them.”
This campaign unveiled something deeper. Through work with organizations like Teach.org, UNDP, and Salesforce.org, the team began to see a pattern that global brands and large-scale nonprofits were facing the same challenge. The problem was translating purpose into engagement at scale. That realization pushed Matchfire in two directions at once: refining the three-way partnership model between brands, celebrities, and nonprofits, and expanding into the storytelling, brand design, and digital experience work that would become the agency’s second act.
Matchfire’s best solutions come from going deep with clients to find the right ones together. They listen closely to see connections no one else has made, then build something that works for everyone in the room.
The First Major Win
The Electrolux campaign, launched in 2008 with Kelly Ripa as its celebrity anchor, was the first time Leslie felt the model could truly scale. It started as a charity eBay auction and grew into a multi-year digital platform called Kelly Confidential, with new campaign layers added every quarter and a creative engine that kept reinventing itself.
When Facebook was just starting to take off, Matchfire pushed to integrate social into the campaign in a way no one had tried before. The Valentine’s Day execution invited users to customize virtual cupcakes and send them to loved ones. It was playful, shareable, and perfectly timed to the moment when Facebook was becoming something more than a place to reconnect with old friends. The campaign shared more than a million cupcakes in 24 hours—each cupcake a donation to charity.
The campaign won a Mashable Award for Most Creative Social Good Campaign. And it was proof that when purpose, creativity, and the right partners come together, the results don’t just perform, they ignite momentum that no media buy can manufacture.
Social Media Found a Purpose
By 2010, Facebook had crossed 500 million users. Social media was no longer just an experiment, but also an infrastructure. And when the Haiti earthquake struck, Matchfire saw an opportunity to point all of that attention toward something that mattered.
At SXSW, the annual gathering of the technology and creative industries in Austin, Texas, Matchfire launched the first-ever geolocation-based charity check-in. In partnership with Microsoft and PayPal, they built a system that triggered a one-dollar donation for each brand sponsor whenever a conference attendee checked in to a venue or session. No auction. No purchase. No exchange of any kind. Just the choice to let a small, everyday action carry a little more weight. Over five days, the campaign raised over $50,000 for Haiti relief.
Noble reflected, “It’s just people going: ‘Yeah, I’ll check in and hopefully send some money to Haiti.’ People remember how you make them feel. And at a really core level, the thing we are best at at Matchfire is providing people, the brand, and the nonprofit with an experience that feels good.”
The Haiti campaign was a breakthrough not just for Matchfire, but for the broader conversation about how best to leverage social media. The first act of any new platform is figuring out how to get attention. The second is figuring out how to make money. The third, and the one Matchfire had always been most interested in, is figuring out how to put those platforms to work for good. For real fundraising. For real causes. Their answer has been consistent across 25 years: when you have people’s attention, use it on their behalf.
LG and the Campaign That Redefined the Agency
LG Experience Happiness wasn’t just another campaign. It was the moment Matchfire stepped into a larger role and redefined itself on two levels.
The first was market position. Nearly 50 years into its presence in the U.S. market, LG North America had decided it was time to build a genuine corporate purpose. That kind of work requires a different kind of partner. Not an agency that executes a brief, but one that can sit at the table before the brief exists, ask the harder questions, and build something from the ground up.
The second was identity. This was the moment the agency proved, to itself and to the market, that it could go from nothing to global. No inherited framework. Just a genuine problem, a client willing to go deep, and a team that knew how to build.
The challenge Matchfire took on was unlike anything they’d built before. LG makes screens. And screens, as research was beginning to make clear, were a significant driver of teen depression, from the comparison culture of social media, the hours lost to passive consumption, and their impact on self-esteem. LG wasn’t going to stop making screens. But the people running the company wanted to be a positive force in the market they occupied, not to deflect criticism, but because they actually meant it.
Matchfire began internally by interviewing LG’s executives and staff. They studied the white space in the market. And then they built the Experience Happiness Program from the ground up. They brought in leading educational institutions CASEL, the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, and Discovery Education, alongside nonprofits with Sustainable Happiness Skills and Social Emotional Learning as part of their DNA, including Inner Explorer, Be Strong, and Project Happiness. They developed a curriculum around the science of sustainable happiness, the idea that happiness is not a feeling but a practice, built from six learnable habits: mindfulness, human connection, positive outlook, purpose, generosity, and gratitude.
Over five years, the program reached six million U.S. students.
The campaign also produced one of Matchfire’s most memorable activations: to commemorate the International Day of Happiness, they executed a dance party at the top of New York City’s Millennium Tower. It was joyful, silly, and completely on-brand for an agency that has always believed the best marketing makes people feel something real.
“That campaign really cemented us in the space in a way that helped us lay claim to not just execution, but also ideas,” Noble observed. “That was a great pivot point for us, where we moved from executing somebody else’s idea to building and executing the entire concept.”
It was a distinction that mattered. Matchfire was no longer the agency you called when you already knew what you wanted to do. It was the agency you called when you needed to figure out what you should do, and then a true partner to help you build it, own it, and make it matter.
The Next Chapter
As Matchfire marks its 25th year, both founders are thinking less about short-term wins and more about what endures. The conversations have shifted from growth to legacy, from the next campaign to the next generation of people who will carry the culture forward.
For Noble, the next chapter isn’t about chasing what’s next in the industry, it’s about going deeper into what has always mattered. Matchfire was built by people who genuinely care about purpose, not as a positioning statement, but as a way of working and living. The priority now is making sure that the belief remains central, that the people who show up every day driven by something more than a deliverable continue to shape what Matchfire becomes. Purpose, for Noble, is the foundation everything else gets built on.
For Leslie, the focus is on depth over breadth—building fewer, deeper partnerships with clients whose purpose aligns with Matchfire’s own. He’s also thinking about succession: what the company looks like when it no longer needs him at the helm, and whether the structure and culture he’s helped build can outlast his tenure.
What unites both founders is a shared definition of success. The measure of success isn’t what you’ve won, it’s the impact left behind. That the work and the people who do it have genuinely left things better than they found them.
“I’d like to think that we left a little dent in the world, and that the people who worked here went on to carry that culture with them. The culture of leaving things better than you found them. That good business can be good business. That you can both make money and do good. I think the legacy has to be the people.” – Joey Leslie
Twenty-five years of igniting experiences. Two founders who still believe, with a quarter-century of evidence as testament, that purpose and profit are not mutually exclusive. The best marketing makes people feel something real. That doing good work and making sure it matters are not competing goals. They are the same goal.
The fire is still burning. The next 25 years start now.