James Whatley is an advertising strategist who helps brands work with video games. His recent clients include Lego, and his recent projects include the DICE Charter, helping games conferences to be more diverse.

We chatted with James to learn about how he uses Buttondown to chat with his audience.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.

Hello. My name is James Whatley, I'm an advertising strategist living and working in London. By day I work with brands helping to figure out how to work in and with video games - most recently I worked with the LEGO Group on the launch of LEGO Fortnite Brick Life and LEGO Fortnite Odyssey. It's been a wild end of the year. On the personal front, I live at home with my partner and our two brilliant kids. We spend our time cooking, going for walks in the nearby fields, and of course - playing video games.

What do you write about on your newsletter?

Five things on Friday started off life waaaaaay back in 2011 as a way to just keep a note of five things that I'd seen that week that made me smile. These days, it's a semi-regularly attempt to keep my writing muscle in shape by finding at least five things that my readers might find interesting. It varies from ads I like and to gaming stuff I've seen, all the way through to wildlife discoveries deep on the ocean floor. If I can find ONE thing that you find interesting, then I've done my job. Of course, as my long-term readers know, the running joke on all of this is Five Things on Friday rarely ever comes on Friday but you always get more than five things.

Where did you first learn of Buttondown, and what made you decide to give it a try?

During the great 'bUt wHaT iF wE sUpPoRtEd nAzI cOnTenT' Substack debacle of late 2023, I started looking around to see where else I could find FToF a home. FToF started out as a weekly entry in my moleskin turned into a Wordpress post (seriously, early editions were just a photo of a page), then I moved to Mailchimp, then to Substack... my readership tends to float around the 4000 subscriber mark and that's a tricky number for quite a few platforms (am I a hobbyist? Am I a professional? - I'm definitely the former but get treated (and charged) like the latter) but what I liked about Buttondown was a) the popular-hobbyist friendly price structure, b) the ability to turn subscriptions on and off (helpful for me as a part-time user), and c) the complete lack of Nazis.

Turns out: the customer service has also been AMAZING.

What are some ways Buttondown has helped you run your email?

In today's parlance, I would be called a 'content creator' (ma'am, I'm a blogger), and as such: I focus on writing. Words are my profession and my hobby. So when it comes to figuring out HTML this or fixing headers and footers for that - I'm at a complete loss. Buttondown has been so helpful to me because whenever I've personally ran into a technical problem, the kind folk at Buttondown have gone above and beyond to help me fix it. Buttondown customer service has fixed my logo header, helped me with my URL sorting (fivethingsonfriday.com is now a thing - yay!) and even rolled out out Bsky Skeet embedding after a rogue mention from me one afternoon. SO IMPRESSIVE.

What are some things you’d be excited to see Buttondown build in the next few months?

For me, I'm just happy supporting a great platform knowing I'm paying for a good service run by good people. Stuff to build in the future? I don't think I can think of anything. The service is already so helpful. Maybe make the mobile stuff easier to use? But who writes newsletters on their mobile?! Tl;dr: keep doing what you're doing, please.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Nothing but love for the Buttondown gang. I'm coming up on a year of being with you and I'm so glad I made the jump. Thanks for being awesome. And have a great 2025.