Team Ares

What Team Ares was

Team Ares started in 2020 as a Fortnite team and became a worldwide marketing, apparel and entertainment organization headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. The business had three pillars: marketing and entertainment (video production, social advertising, and sponsored placements across our creators), apparel (scheduled merch drops and community events), and the creator network itself — content creators on YouTube and TikTok plus a roster of Twitch streamers, packaged into one audience a brand could buy.

My own esports team was bought out by Team Ares when I was 16, and I came in as an owner and CEO. I co-owned the company with three partners who ran content, operations and creator support. My lane was the business: I built the sponsor deck, priced and sold the packages, managed the partners, planned the events, and directed the brand and every piece of creative that went out.

By the numbers

Audience: 76% male / 24% female, 54% aged 18–34, top locations US, UK, Canada and Australia. Figures from the Team Ares pitch sheet and the creator analytics I maintained monthly.

Sponsorships and brand partners

Sponsorship was the revenue engine and it was mine end to end: outreach, the deck, pricing, contracts, and delivery. Recent brand partners on the pitch sheet were SCUF Gaming, Epic Games, Samsung and AXE; other deals I closed and delivered include the NXT LVL Gamer Shots recruitment campaign, the ExitLag partnership (October 2023), the Ares × Rematch.GG $2,500 NAE Duos Cash Cup (January 2022), and an Arrivant activation.

Packages ran from $4,999 (five custom creator ads, shoutouts, two live-stream activations) to a $74,999 awareness campaign (100 creator ads, 100 shoutouts, month-long logo and bio placements). Under the packages sat a rate card I kept for 15+ creators — $125 to $7,000 per ad, $150 to $200 per stream hour — so every deal could be priced from real numbers.

The sponsor deck

This is the deck I designed and sent to brands — the 2023 version. Eleven slides: who we were, what the creator network reached, the roster, our own channel analytics, the three packages, and what a live-stream activation or a recruitment challenge looked like for a sponsor. Nine of them are below; click any slide to open it full size.

The package prices on slide 7 are the 2023 deck's; the pitch sheet above shows the later $4,999 / $19,999 / $74,999 tiers. The leadership and contact slides are left out.

Merch: four collections

I ran apparel from concept to sell-through — product design, mockups, the store, the drop video, and the marketing around each release. The "God of War" drop (June 2021) shipped Red, Gold and War editions. "Art of War" (October 2021) was a tee-and-hoodie release to mark 50,000 subscribers and sold out. The "Claim the Throne" collection (2022) was the biggest: Crown and Sword lines, hats and jerseys, with a full video advertisement produced in-house. The 2023 drop went with the rebrand: a vintage-washed black tee carrying the new ARES wordmark on the chest, three marks down the sleeve and a tone-on-tone mark across the back, alongside the purple "Ares Uprise" sweatshirt and sticker designs.

See every collection and the drop teasers on the home page ↗

Brand and creative direction

Three identities over four years, all directed by me. Each one below is its own set — profile picture, headers, wallpaper, and in 2023 the wordmark and the drop that went with it.

December 2021 revamp The "God of War" era look

The white Ares mark over a dark, textured Parthenon skyline with red streaks — profile picture in a red ring, X header, YouTube banner and a wallpaper, rolled out across every channel to match the God of War drop.

2022 revamp The professional system

Red-and-black, a new mark, X and YouTube headers, stream overlays (starting soon, be right back, intermission), milestone and birthday templates for creators, and the store — the identity behind "Claim the Throne."

2023 rebrand "The start of the next chapter" — the purple world, the ARES wordmark, the 2023 drop

The rebrand moved Ares into an illustrated purple world. The ARES wordmark — the triangle mark built into the A — is the logo that sits on the purple assets and on the 2023 tee: a vintage-washed black tee with the wordmark on the chest, three marks down the sleeve, and a tone-on-tone mark across the back.

Events and community

We took the roster to TwitchCon San Diego in October 2022, ran in-person team meetups in Arizona in 2022, hosted cash-prize tournaments through the Ares Discord, and ran the multi-week #ClaimTheThrone recruitment challenge that turned open tryouts into sponsored content. The X community alone had 300+ members.

The creator network

Content creators on YouTube and TikTok — JackieZ, ThatNerdChris, Lachyz, Takeoff, Syinite, Kinja, Klarque Clint, ReelHoops, FrankN, Gift and more — and a Twitch streamer roster including LQWID, Marine Mike, Saloodz, Loserbeam, Evolve Jake and JVMafia. I tracked every creator's followers, views and engagement by platform in a monthly analytics sheet, which is where the pitch-sheet numbers came from.

Timeline

Questions people ask about Team Ares