Mentioned in this article Games: Overwatch Teams: Splyce

The newly-named team will be branded using red, white, black and grey.

The Defiant name was chosen to resemble the resilience of Toronto’s citizens.

Defiant’s launch party closely aligns with OWL’s emphasis activating regional fan bases.

Toronto’s Overwatch League expansion franchise officially has a name: the Defiant.

The team unveiled the name, along with its red, white, black, and grey branding, in front of an intimate, sold out crowd of 350 fans in downtown Toronto on Wednesday. Defiant partnered with Intel and OMEN by HP for the launch party and broadcasted the event live on Twitch and Twitter.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“What I love most about the city, and the country of Canada, is that it’s a mosaic.”[/perfectpullquote]

Though the name “Defiant” could be interpreted as rebellious in nature, Chris Overholt, who serves as president and CEO of the team’s owner OverActive Media, said that the name is less about disobedience and more about Torontonians’ resilient disposition.

“We’re a city, and a country in fact, made up of peoples from around the world, and as a result, the city has a certain resilience to it, a certain grittiness to it I think that really can’t be denied,” Overholt said. “What I love most about the city, and the country of Canada, is that it’s a mosaic. We get to stand for who we are, and then we get to stand together as a city and a nation.”

“That really started to define the conversation as it came to Defiant.”

The team, which is operated by esports organization Splyce , worked with Toronto-based Diamond Marketing, OverActive’s agency of record, to craft the newly announced branding.The group has spent the past seven weeks fine-tuning its details.

“We really wanted to ensure we were representing Toronto on the world stage, while being authentic to the avid gamer,” Josh Diamond, partner at Diamond said. “Recently, our city has gained tremendous notoriety for being exporters of culture, and just as gamers continue to defy odds, so too does Toronto. And it’s those aspects of our collective identities that we wanted to celebrate in our brand.”

Within 24 hours of landing their expansion bid, Overholt’s team was on the phone with Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan’s team. The following day, the franchise began sculpting its strategy.

“We spent four hours, I think, that Friday morning talking about the brand position and really focused on the city and what we thought defined the city of Toronto and the people that live in the city,” Overholt said.

The Defiant logo features a combination of red, black, white, and grey. However, while the red and white ties to the Canadian flag are clear, Overholt said that there was much more that went into picking the “bold” color combination.

“Obviously, red and white mean something to the nation of Canada, so that wasn’t lost on us,” Overholt said. “But as we looked at the game and we looked at the heroes inside the game, we imagined how our colors would come to life as skins on those heroes. We just really liked that palette. We thought it was versatile and had broad appeal.”

Party Time

Defiant’s designated marketing area spans the greater Toronto area as well as western New York. Overholt said that the team wanted to engage its regional fan base when launching the brand.

“We really wanted to do a launch event for our fans. It was really clear that there was a pent up conversation online, and we really wanted to do something special out of the gate,” he said. “So much of a fan’s connection to any franchise, if executed well from the onset, can be an emotional connection.” “In our case, we feel like its pent up and exists almost to some level now. So we really wanted to honor that in the way we started with our best foot forward.”

While no other team has taken this approach to its brand launch, numerous teams took advantage of the league’s regionalized franchising model to activate in their home market during the inaugural season.

Defiant’s branding strategy and launch event show that the franchise is already acutely aware of the growing importance of event-based team activations in esports, despite not having played a game yet.