SHOW YOUR COLORS

This campaign had significant constraints: No paid media and just 3 months to execute from brief to delivery.

If we missed the deadline we’d miss holiday sales – a make it or break it period for any consumer electronics business.

I quickly decided to focus the team’s attention on three channels where SteelSeries was already strong: Influencers, social media and retail/etail.

Together with THANKYOU, we built a three-part campaign that leveraged these channels and helped SteelSeries build enough buzz to generate sales. It also made it possible to launch on time while the team continued to produce more content that could sustain the campaign through Christmas.

Gaming was still breaking into the mainstream and gamers were often faced with stereotypical definitions like being called “anti-social” or “time wasters” without goals for their future.

As a brand of the culture, SteelSeries has always fought these stereotypes, whether through sponsorships that made gaming a viable career choice, or in this case an iconic headset design that both performed well while gaming and could be worn on the street.

That brand quality combined with the cultural insight is what gave birth to Show Your Colors, a tagline and dual purpose call-to-action that:

• Invited gamers to connect with (and re-share) relatable stories of SteelSeries’ brand ambassadors
  
• Encouraged the purchase of the newly released headset color variants
  

With this idea we began creating a plan for creating content that was so good, that it could generate a ton of earned awareness through engagement and sharing on social media.

The main campaign push centered around 5 ambassadors with very different roots - both online and offline. 

Together with each influencer we created a script and storyboard that showcased things they’d do on any given day, while talking about their personal experience of being a gamer.

Due to budget and time constraints, we had to create a fictious meta story of all influencers walking around Chicago and finally meeting up. This tied together all films visually, but it also allowed us to fly in all influencers and produce a ton of content over a short period of time.

The storytelling approach was also formalised and shared with regional sales and marketing teams so they could do their own with local brand ambassadors and in their language.