The video that changed everything
How a single piece of marketing content accidentally transformed what this company stood for.
Company branding can be kind of boring.
There. I said it.
There may well be entire industries devoted to it, but more often than not it’s monotonous, repetitive and sometimes, really quite dull.
Why is that? Messages permeate through repetition, so most long-established companies do and say the same kinds of things in lots of different places, over and over again, in order for people to remember them and buy the things they sell.
The Golden Arches. Just do it. Good things come to those who wait.
You don’t need me to tell you which brands these signs and straplines represent. I’d be willing to bet you’ve crossed them in some shape or form today already.
Of course, when people know what a company stands for and place their trust in it as a brand, it makes sense for companies to continue to do things that are similar to what they’ve always done.
But what if you’re the new kid on the block? What if you started a company with a vision to do things differently, to do things better? Could being different in your marketing and branding help you to stand out above the rest?
We’re seeing the likes of Brewdog, Oatly and Hey disrupt (yeah, startup buzzword, sorry) mature markets by being bold, relatable, honest and more-than-a-little-bit-different.
So when Futureplay was founded with a vision to do things differently, in some ways it made sense to do the same.
Traditionally, the gaming industry is slow and clunky, with lots of moving parts contributing to lots of different processes that in reality are pretty frustrating.
In practice, that means lots of people can spend lots of time putting their heart and soul into working on a product that they love and care about, only to see some person in some place decide it’s not quite up to scratch, and make the decision to kill it before launch. Sucks, huh?
We wanted to break the mould of things like this happening.
We believed in doing things in a way that made sense to us, like:
Releasing fast, failing quickly, picking up the pieces and moving on, taking our learnings from each experience — success or failure — to improve next time around. Why spend years making a game only for it never to reach soft launch?
Empowering our artists, coders and designers to make decisions. Where some studios have some person in some closed-off room far away from where an actual game is being developed making important decisions that can affect the future of a game, we were founded on the belief of virtually no hierarchy, with everyone in the company being able to contribute to every decision.
Ownership, autonomy and an unrelenting focus on results over processes. We’d seen that hellish corporate structures like middle-management created silos that killed productivity, and we were determined to avoid that.
Communicating openly about absolutely everything, whether it’s a line of code or the allocation of our multi-million euro user acquisition budget. We knew communication in lots of traditional companies is broken so we built a culture of oppenness and transparency from the start, where people are encouraged to share their failings even more than their successes — externally as well as internally.
In short, we wanted nothing more than to make great mobile games — without egos, politics or quite frankly anything else getting in the way.
But how could all that be summed up in a corporate strapline? How could we reflect this in our company branding?
We knew what we stood for, and we landed on the perfect way to describe it:
No bullshit.
Encapsulating. All-encompassing. Vague, but purposefully so.
Setting a development deadline and then crunching to have to achieve it, without having the power to make the decision to change it? That’s bullshit.
Judging someone for something they tried to do and failed, though they never would have learned if they hadn’t tried it in the first place? That’s bullshit.
Bringing an attitude to work and not taking pride in what you’re doing? That’s bullshit.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
It was with this mantra that we set about creating our company marketing video.
Though we produced it last autumn, we’ve only been able to bring ourselves to release it now.
Watch it below. It’s more-than-a-little-bit different.
But why has it taken us so long to release it?
The video is no bullshit, in every sense of the phrase, right? Corporate brand consultant flies into Finland from the US-of-A to tell them how to they should convey themselves as a brand, and ends up talking a load of absolute tosh. It’s supposed to be funny.
It made for a different kind of marketing video that would have positioned Futureplay a bit differently in the mobile gaming space.
Now, we have always been no bullshit. And we’ll try our damned hardest to ensure that we always stay no bullshit.
But when watching this video back, as a company, it became apparent that we had evolved beyond that simple strapline.
We needed something that could better communicate why we exist, who we are, what we do and how we provide something that adds value to people’s lives.
And in this instance, it’s the latter part of that that’s particularly tricky. We’re not a B2C brand like McDonald’s, Nike or Guinness, and the gaming studio behind the games needs nowhere near as much marketing attention as the games themselves.
But our people still need something to stand behind.
When brand is something that should run through the heart of your company, it’s important that everyone’s fully on-board. In a company like Futureplay, where everyone gets the chance to have their say on everything, it’s important for a marketer to get that message exactly right.
It’s for that reason that when people voiced their unease about the implications of no bullshit and whether or not it relayed well enough what we stood for, that we set about holding sessions on evolving our company values, and discussed how we could articulate them in our branding.
It’s for that reason that we now have a set of solid company values that we can stand behind with pride. A set of values that means more to us than no bullshit.
It’s for that reason that this video has been unreleased for almost a year.
And slowly but surely, as we work on them more, these company values are starting to become more present. More workshops. Planned offsites (albeit, remote). Better communication and increased transparency. More blogs, which help us refine our values further and keep our mentality consistent between teams (something that’s a challenge in a flat structure like ours). A more tangible understanding of consensus, because for us, the majority being behind something far outweighs one person’s opinion, and taking our time to ensure that all viewpoints are considered is what we stand for more than anything else.
We might not have made this video with the goal of evolving our values, and it’s certainly not the only thing that’s caused the way we view ourselves to shift — but it’s sure helped us along the way.
