detroit pistons SOCIAL MEDIA CREATIVE DIRECTION 2022-’23

I was tasked with building out brand guidelines and visuals for photography, videography, and social media for the 2022-2023 Detroit Pistons social media.

My first focus in overhauling the brand was ensuring that there was continuity in all imagery across all platforms. The first step of this was building out brand LUTs and LR presets from the ground up, which will be delved into later on, but the second step was presentation and curation on social.

In figuring out how to approach creating a new social media brand within strict yet gray corporate brand guidelines, I identified 3 fundamental issues with how the brand was presenting itself on social media:

1) INCONSISTENT COLORS/ SKIN TONES

2) HARD TO READ TEXT GRAPHICS

3) POORLY USED, distracting ELEMENTS

Below is how we fixed that, with comparison images from the previous year (top).

My team and I sought to achieve consistency on the feed while creating hyper-sharable content based on the CULTURE of the team that would perform regardless of the results on court.

In doing this, I created two content series’ for the Pistons social media page:

• Detroit wins

• detroit basketball

for a team with no visual or court identity, these served a dualistic purpose: showing fans the culture that existed within the team while giving them a clean, elevated graphic to share on their own stories. These content series were the two best performing series in the team’s digital history and garnered hundreds of thousands of shares amidst an 18 win season.

Detroit Wins provided a new take on a win graphic, allowing fans to re-share and interact with a post that felt less corporate in an age where authenticity is an ever important aspect of social. Detroit Basketball provided an editorial look into the team’s inner life through the lens of film captured throughout the year. It offered fans the ability to engage in a new style of content while riding the wave of trends in film photography.

As seen through the feed comparisons, I also built different presets for each jersey in order to build more visual branding around each activation and jersey night. They can be seen below:

Despite a worse season on the court and stars benched for the entire year, Pistons social media performed at a 1.3x higher engagement rate than the previous year.