A bit about the new brand

BY: RYAN ANDERSON  |  Fuel Buzz, Uncategorized

Well, in honesty, it’s not all that new. We publicly announced our new brand and positioning a few months back at the grand opening of our new studio, and really, we’ve been operating under the ideals of the brand for even longer.

On the surface, our the Fuel brand doesn’t look much different. We’ve updated the logo ever-so-slightly, changed our colour scheme and brightened up our overall look from the rough, dark images that we used to use. Under the hood, though, that’s where we spent most of our time and effort retooling.

The point of this whole exercise was to make our brand crystal clear. That’s not an easy thing to do when you do something that lies beyond the realm of classification. When people come across something like that, they immediately take it upon themselves to try to put it into a predefined group. We get called an ad agency, a game developer, an interactive shop, a design studio, and the fact is that all of those labels are right… sort of. We’re all and none of those things, all at the same time.

What we really do when you get down to it, is create entertainment. Sometimes its a game, sometimes it’s a fun viral, sometimes it’s a tongue-in-cheek microsite or even a brand new kind of toy. That’s why we went with “branded entertainment evolved” as our tagline / position statement / phrase we mutter to ourselves in our sleep. Our philosophy is that you can only cram so many advertising messages down someone’s throat. There are only so many billboards along a highway, LCD monitors you can put in elevators and only so many asses you can paint logos on to get people’s attention. As people get more and more overcrowded, you need to make something that people want to interact with if you want them to pay attention, whether it’s an ad, a website or any other type of online experience.

We’ve evolved immensely as a company over the past year, and there’s a lot of talk about ‘new’ - new faces, new clients, new divisions. But all of this comes from one big new - and that’s our fundamental philosophy of what we do. We create online branded entertainment, and our goal is to be the best at it. It’s not the easiest concept to communicate, due to the fact that it’s something that very few people are doing, but it’s a philosophy that has resonated with our clients and with the people who play our games and visit our sites. We’re spending a lot of time inventing new stuff, and paying attention to what’s working and what’s not so that we can make sure that we stay on the leading edge as we get bigger.

The point of this post is to clarify what Fuel Industries really is to all of you reading. It’s a difficult thing to do if you’re not here, seeing our artists create characters and environments, seeing our writers craft scripts and listening to the flow of ideas, but it’s a start. I’ll try to shed more light on it as time goes on, and I write more here.