Pokémon

…Now, imagine being trusted with creating their adverts and social presence.

How do I cope with high pressure environments you ask? Yeah, I’d say better than most.

If I show you everything I worked on we’ll be here all day so here’s the headlines: Pokémon is a huge global phenomenon in it’s third decade with fans ranging in age from kids to their parents who grew up with the brand (and are now busy spending their house deposits on buying mint condition first edition Charizard holographic trading cards).

That’s the level of love and obsessiveness you need to be able to comprehend and please with your creative work.

Globally within the brand, there’s multiple stakeholders with unique asset needs for their regions, combined with different brand sensitivities and audience expectations: What you might get away with in Japan will be a flat out “no” in the USA. What gets great engagement in South America will mean nothing to EMEA.

This means you need to be very clued up on a constantly evolving global release calendar that brings out updates to the card game several times a year, a new video game almost annually and that’s before you even get started on the merch and the animations…

My work covered a huge range of things as you can see from the examples. The area I was probably most obsessive over was refining and constantly pushing what we could do on social channels and paid media for TCG (that’s the Trading Card Game).

This involved leading teams to understand the importance of how we thought about the creative response to briefs: from the initial ideation, through to different cutdowns. All whilst keeping motivation high and preventing a creative department from becoming disheartened by how slow innovation can feel when you’ve got the comprehensive guidelines of a much beloved brand to adhere to.

It would be slightly disingenuous to suggest the ongoing success of a global behemoth could be entirely attributed to just how much care and attention was given to every detail (yes, even including banner ads…) however, the creative reputation grew to become the standard by which other agency work was measured against for brand guardianship and can take credit for the following:

- Launched the TCG TikTok and quickly found and established an audience there

- Developed a system of DCO / programatic and A/B testing led paid media cutdowns for the hero content: which could then be optimised to deliver different messaging for multiple demographics and regions from a single master asset without it feeling tired.

- Made a series of anniversary music videos with some of the world’s biggest and best known artists.

- Developed a simplified presentation system for busy clients: ensuring ideas were consistently easy to understand for all stakeholders and could be very quickly relayed and responded to.

- Ran a dedicated R&D process to push creative boundaries for larger budget opportunities and develop and refine returning formats for social content.

- …and all of these combined contributed to the brand achieving some all time high sales figures during my time working on the account.