You’ve spent the last 70 hours playing the most epic role-playing game you’ve ever completed. The credits roll and “The End” shows up on the screen. What now?
Pocket Strategy YouTube Channel Artwork
Why did we create the brand?
It’s March 2020 and Covid-19 has hit the world like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We no longer are allowed to meet people in-person and all of sudden our space feels small.
For me specifically, I missed talking to my brother about the latest and greatest video games. See, the problem is, a lot of the games my brother and I like to play tend to get little to no press on mainstream gaming news platforms. So we decided to turn the tables on Covid. Instead of locking ourselves inside the house, we took the idea of “everything has to be remote” as an opportunity to create something new. We taught ourselves how to make our very own gaming podcast and YouTube channel to share the best games to play with the world.
YouTube Gaming Reviews
From “Let’s Play” videos to full-on game reviews, the YouTube Channel catered to a more in-depth look at some of the hottest games we were playing at the time and would recommend to everyone to give it a shot. It also was a good opportunity to revisit some of the classic games we played when we were younger and introduce them to a new audience that might have missed it the first time (Ie. Donkey Kong Country).
A few examples of YouTube thumbnails. We kept the icon in the upper right corner and text in pretty much the same place, in order to create a uniform look on the entire channel.
Dynamic Branding using Adobe Creative Suite's power!
I created a dynamic YouTube opener, where you could easily update the title of your video and have the same glitch animation every time. We wanted to recreate the feel of a 90’s arcade machine because our mission is to not only feature the newest game releases, but to also highlight the best games from the past. We are from the 90’s after all, I still remember carrying around pocket change back in the day (Yes, that influenced our name).
However, my brother is still new to the Adobe Creative suite. So while he was learning how to use After Effects and Premiere, I decided to make the opener into an Essential Graphics template. So that the template was easy to edit and did not need someone with extensive video production knowledge to create a new opener. The video above shows how you would edit it in after effects, but a ".mogrt" file was also created for Premiere.
Pocket Strategy podcast on Spotify
Every podcast episode we would feature the latest gaming news and make sure to talk about games we were currently playing or excited to play in the near future. We made an effort to feature more small budget or better known as "Indy games" that other large platforms did not pay as much attention to.
Social Media Content Marketing Strategy
To build hype for the podcast channel and to feature the most ground breaking news of the day, I created Instagram templates to further the conversation on social media. Here are a few major gaming stories that illustrate how consistent type, color, and layout can create a dynamic brand.
One of our most engaged posts is this carousel of the (at the time) newly released Halo Infinite armors. I attribute the success of this post not only to the branding, but to us being able to post it faster than other large gaming networks.
On top of news-of-the-day Instagram carousels, we also created carousels on games we thought people should try. These carousels would go more in-depth on what made a game special. For example with Indivisible, the art style alone made it a game worth trying.
To better fill out our content marketing strategy, we also created graph content and twitter headline templates. This also gave us an opportunity to introduce more color options (Ie. pink & purple) and create a more lively brand.
A big addition to our gaming news content was to feature "Xbox Game Pass" games because we believe it is the best deal in gaming. One of those games that gets lost in the shuffle is Quantum Break! Featuring characters such as Game of Thrones actor “Little Finger,” Aiden Gillen, Quantum break is a thriller of a story. Need more reasons, we got you! This Instagram Carousel has more to learn about this science fiction action-adventure third-person shooter.
To further the brand, we created variations for Downloadable Content (DLC) and previewing upcoming releases like the above “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” example. With the preview templates, we started using the “Bolt” icon as a design frame to take a look into the future.
For new product releases, we got experimental with typography and gradients to bring more hype and attention. The typography option is great because you can update it for many different languages.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it's great to share the gift of great video games because there really is a game for everybody out there. With Pocket Strategy we are able to share that excitement with other players around the world and the dynamic nature of this brand that we built helps us amplify our message through many different platforms.
So, the next time you finish your favorite game and wonder "what now?," give us a shout and we'll point you in the right direction.
