Internet shops in the Philippines differ vastly in their hardware, pricing and appearance, but if you enter into any of them across the country, there will be one common sight: Someone—or more often than not, a whole row of young teens and twenty-somethings—will be playing Defense of the Ancients II or DotA 2, shouting in both defeat and in victory.
Yet despite the ubiquity of DotA 2 among the country’s tech-savvy, upwardly mobile youth, almost no brand in the Philippines see the title as anything more than, well, a game, and who can blame them?
At first glance, the premise of DotA seems overly simple: The game pits two teams of five against one another in a battle to destroy the other’s base, known as “The Ancient.”
I, too, was once part of the majority of Filipinos who view DotA as a harmless pastime—that is, until I joined TaskUs in 2015.
Tasked to build out a marketing team composed of transmedia artists and communicators, I knew we would have to create all the traditional forms of content for our social media channels, including videos, photos, GIFs, infographics and blogs.
But part of me wanted to do more.
The Philippines, after all, had been named as the social capital media of the world by Universal McCann in 2008, due to the sheer volume of our activity across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms.
If the Philippines could lead the way in terms of social media output, could we not also pioneer the type of content we generated?
This question led me to think about Twitch.tv.
Originally conceived as a general interest live streaming site, Twitch.tv was spun off from its Justin.tv predecessor when the gaming category soared in demand, far and above any other vertical.
The revelation here was profound, if not counterintuitive: People not only liked playing games—they liked watching people play games.
One of the most popular streamed games, of course, was DotA . In February 2018 alone, Twitch.tv users collectively spent 32 million hours watching matches.
And just one month later, pro-gamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins teamed up with rappers Travis Scott and Drake, along with Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, for a record-breaking 628,000 concurrent viewers of their Fortnite stream.
Based on these insights, we at TaskUs set out to organize and produce a DotA professional e-sports team, who would be known as the TaskUs Titans, as each was hired as a TaskUs team member.
While the decision was certainly unconventional—we could not name a single other company in Southeast Asia, let alone the Philippines, that had a branded e-sports team at the time—the return over the past years have been tremendous. The TaskUs Titans have not only provided us what is asked, but they have embodied our core values throughout their training and competition, before millions of gaming fans across the country.
Sponsoring an e-sports team will certainly not make sense for every brand, but understanding how we managed to put the TaskUs Titans together may provide business leaders with ideas for how they also might also draw on unorthodox content creators for their social channels.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far on our journey.
Give them tunnel vision. Idiomatically, tunnel vision is generally seen as a negative, but it can also be a positive when dealing with content creators who need to perform.
In the case of the TaskUs Titans, for example, you want them to focus on one thing and one thing alone: winning.
For when they succeed, they symbolically carry and wave the TaskUs flag to gaming audiences nationally and internationally.
That’s why we see to it they have nothing else to worry about other than improving as gamers.
We provide them with the best equipment and peripherals, a penthouse flat in Quezon City, and even special diets and fitness regimen oriented towards performance.
Find ways to measure success. Even if you call on unique content creators like an e-sports team, you still must establish key performance indicators and provide them the support to help them reach it.
To this end, each member of the TaskUs Titans has gaming-related KPIs.
They must also report to all DotA training, watch the required game tape, adhere to the diet provided by a wellness coach, develop their internal communications for matches, and even lift weights at the gym—our Titans are very much athletes in every sense of the word. Creating this kind of rigorous yet supportive environment for success ensures that they can reach the milestones you both want to achieve.
Align brand values with one another. There are plenty of ways to generate engagement on your social channels, so if you’re going to call on unique content creators like an e-sports team, you still should make sure to reflect your brand values.
Luckily, the TaskUs Titans reflect each of TaskUs’ eight values in spades, such as how they seek continuous self-improvement when they work with our performance coach or how they strive for excellence when competing on the world’s stage with some of the best DotA teams ever assembled. The fact that they were willing to collaborate with TaskUs in the first place reflects their desire to be ridiculous, as you should be when imagining new sources of content to speak to your audience: When others in your space may be stuck asking “Why?”, be the one moving forward, demanding, “Why not?” —CONTRIBUTED