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.

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. "Ares Uprise" (2023) was designed but never dropped.

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

Brand and creative direction

Three identities over four years. The 2022 revamp was the professional one: a red-and-black system with 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 2023 rebrand moved to a purple illustrated world — "the start of the next chapter." I directed both.

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