brad van schaik

Change the Game:
A BuzzFeed and Google Collab

BuzzFeed brought me to new York to lead larger, more integrated brand collaborations that wouldn’t feel like advertising.

This was a seven month program and one of the largest I designed. The brief was to help Google reverse gender inequality in the game design industry with their Change The Game Challenge. The work done in prior years was great by ad industry standards, yet it struggled to resonate with young people. It’s why they came to BuzzFeed and why BuzzFeed engaged me.

What is change the game?

CTG is a Google initiative built to close the gender gap in the gaming industry by eliminating the misconceptions holding back talented young women from pursing careers in the field. Every year they hold a competition where young women can submit game ideas for the chance to have them made into real apps with the help of Google devs and designers.

What Google Told Us:

Despite being heavy gamers, many young Women believe they don’t belong in the gaming industry, So they never pursue futures in it.

Many think it’s a ‘boys club’ that primarily revolves around coding. A Google white paper quantified this barrier.

What we told google:

Let’s stop telling young women That game design is for them and instead help them believe it’s for them.

No offense to males in the industry but here’s the truth:

You don’t have to look far to see that the world’s most popular games (in an industry lead by males) are generally focussed on “knocking people and things down.” We could argue that, given the state of the world, these games aren’t the most helpful. Inversely, when given the creative freedom, women design games that “build people and things up.” They tend to use it as a powerful medium, capable of telling unforgettable stories, sharing powerful ideas, and influencing people for the better. Need proof? Google past winners of the Change The Game contest.

We wanted girls to believe that any game they want to make is exactly the type of game that should be made.

So, We didn’t tell young women they COULD enter Google’s Change the Game contest to become game designers, We helped them BELIEVE they already had the tools.

I lead the BuzzFeed team and pitched a 7-month content strategy and communication plan that would help remove misconceptions, not just by pointing at them and expecting change, but by empowering young women to believe they already had the tools to pursue game design… like right now. Below was our blueprint:

When a company says they believe in you, you hear them. When someone you trust Says the same thing, you listen. It’s why having the right voice was so crucial.

Kelsey Immpichiche is one of BuzzFeed’s most influential females and just happens to be huge in the gaming world as well. We worked with Google to get her on the judging panel of the contest, which meant she would see the submissions and help select the final winner. Why was this significant? It meant we could inject a level of humanity, authenticity and sincerity into campaign messaging. For instance, Kelsey would let us trade brand-lead CTAs like “Enter Now!” for personal requests like “Hey, I really want to see your ideas!”

The seven month campaign started with a personalized call for entry from Kelsey.

Using an IG Story, Kelsey introduced BuzzFeed’s massive audience to the contest, explained why it exists, and announced that SHE would be a judge. We wanted anyone with an idea to believe theirs was worth submitting and that Kelsey wanted to see it - not just Google. In one fowl swoop, this first IG Story eliminated a lot of barriers to entry.

In a 3-Video series, Kelsey followed the Five finalists on their game design journeys, to show the audience just how Similar they were to them.

The series took multiple hits at the glass ceiling by focussing on key audience takeaways:

1. “Hey, they’re just like me!”
   Kelsey talked to the girls about how incredible it was to see their games coming to life. Before being selected as finalists, the top five were just young women with great ideas, which is all anyone needs to pursue game design.
   

2. “Behind the code is just a great idea. I could do that!”
   Looking at a finished game and having no idea how it was created is intimidating, if you want to be a game designer. It’s why the series followed the finalists from concept to final game, proving that great games are ideas first. Simple.
   

3. “Games don’t have to appeal to a mass audience.”
   The series focussed on how unique the games were and how personal they were to the girls who designed them. P.S. None of them were first person shooters.
   

4. “They did it!”
   Kelsey talked to the girls about how empowering it was to build their games with the Google team and how incredible it was going to be to have people play them out in the real world.

IN every phase of the campaign, we included BuzzFeed posts to help young girls believe. Each took a slightly different approach.

This one was a BuzzFeed Quiz that served up a game design career best suited to the quiz taker.

If we wanted our audience to believe they could be game designers, There was Perhaps no better proof point than announcing the completed games on buzzFeed.

For this post, it was particularly important to remind the audience that the final, polished games, now available in the Google Play Store, all started as ideas on a page. Side-by-side images were used throughout the post to illustrate this.

Click/tap the image below to see the entire post.

The five finalists, selected by google and Kelsey, were incredible. their games are all available right now in the google play store :)

We built our strategy around the simple truth that, girls make incredible games and have permission to BELIEVE that. There’s no better proof than these five game designers and their games. (Click/tap to enlarge)