How UW’s creative department is making its mark in the NIL era

Trust is a phone call. A secret. A team-wide surprise.

On the evening of Saturday, Dec. 3, Michael Penix Jr. talked to his parents, then called UW senior director of creative services Kasey Byers. Not head coach Kalen DeBoer or offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb. Not Husky athletic director Jen Cohen. Not his wide receiver or his center or his backup quarterback.

Penix trusted his secret — his football future — to the video guy.

“I’m coming back,” Penix told him. “What do you think we should do?”

UW’s season-ending banquet was scheduled for the following night, and Penix wanted to surprise his teammates (not to mention the coaches, parents and donors in attendance) with a video announcing his return in 2023. They decided he’d write a letter to UW football fans, record the audio on his phone and send it to Byers — who would pair it with 95 seconds of hastily assembled Husky highlights.

“It was the most exciting and nerve-wracking phone call I ever got,” Byers told The Times this week.

Armed with program-altering info, Byers went to work, while Penix penned his letter.

“We turned that video around in like two hours,” Byers said. “That next day I was meeting with him in corners of this [UW football] building with a laptop, showing him the video. Because if his teammates saw him with me doing that, they would have known what that was about.

“I had to go to the production company that was running that banquet and change the file name [of the video so no one would know its contents]. I just said, ‘Do not test this video. You’re going to have to play it blind.’ Because they were testing videos while people were working in the banquet room. So I was trying to make sure that really was a surprise for everybody.”

As Penix’s voice-over dramatically spilled the secret, DeBoer raised both hands to the sky. A volley of voices and claps and echoing woofs rang through the banquet room. Said video has since been seen on Twitter more than 502,000 times.

For UW football’s creative team — Byers included — trust is not an accident. With every video, every idea, every interaction, it was earned.

Eventually.

“I think a lot of football programs have these content creators and they just try to stick things to the wall. Everyone just kind of ends up working in silos,” said Byers, who came to UW after five years at Oregon State. “I learned through all my years working on the athletic [department] side that you have to approach it like an ad agency. You have to really get your graphic, your social, your video all in unison.

“You have all this messaging, but how do you strategically plan to utilize all the assets together to convey the messaging of your program? I just felt we weren’t doing that [when I arrived in 2021].”

After being brought on in a more straightforward video role, Byers — who served previous stints at New Mexico (2014-15), North Dakota State (2010-14) and with the Denver Broncos (2007-09) — was promoted to senior director of creative services last offseason. He went to work restructuring UW’s creative department with more defined roles — including two dedicated full-time video specialists, two graphic designers and a director of social media.

The latter position, he said, was particularly important.

“I knew that our social media position was not where it needed to be,” Byers explained. “So in June when I took over [as senior director of creative services], the first thing we did is rewrote that job and wanted to bring it within creative. Because before it was a job that kind of sat on its own. It wasn’t under an umbrella. I said, ‘Your social media person has to be working with your content creators every day.’”

Enter Hadley Heck.

Heck — a former Portland State volleyball player who interned with Byers at Oregon State in 2018 before securing a master’s degree in sports journalism at Arizona State — was working a social media job at OSU when Byers beckoned.

But that wasn’t the phone call she remembers most.

“It was my interview with coach DeBoer,” said Heck, who runs team accounts with 20,000 followers on TikTok, 183,000 followers on Twitter and 134,000 followers on Instagram. “The last thing a head coach wants to do is talk to a social media candidate over the phone on a Saturday in July when he’s off. I was like, ‘This is going to be a 10-minute phone call, check my background, P’s and Q’s, whatever.’ He talked to me for like 45 minutes to an hour during his month off. He was actually at his daughter’s softball game. I could hear cheering in the background, and he was just having a really personal conversation with me.

“One of the questions I asked him was, ‘Ultimately I’m representing you by running these accounts. How do you want me to do that?’”

Trust is a social media megaphone.

And, at Washington, an unwavering message.

“Coach DeBoer says it all the time: We’re going to be first class in everything we do,” Byers said. “We’re going to promote everything that we feel strongly about within our building, which is relationships, not engaging in the wittiness between other [programs]. In social, we see it all the time. There’s a lot of colleges that are going to make things that take jabs at other teams. If I did that, we’d be in a closed-door meeting with Coach. That’s not who we are.”

A more streamlined organizational structure and a clear identity have allowed UW’s creative team to work more proactively, rather than scrambling to cover team and recruiting news. Byers and DeBoer met every Monday during the season to outline their ideas. The creative team also met each Monday at 9 a.m. to plan their week and discuss strategy and how the Huskies could capitalize on social trends. Together, they produce videos, custom recruiting graphics and internal designs for facility branding, slideshows, presentations and more.

Oh, and being UW’s quasi-advertising agency also allows you to do what Byers calls “big, fun things.”

Like the team’s in-season weekly movie poster parodies — of “Step Brothers,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Home Alone,” “Superbad,” “Friday” and more. Like the “Be Like Mike” video promoting Penix’s Heisman campaign. Like pregame hype videos narrated by Husky alumni. Like cinematic highlight videos and Halloween pranks and photo shoots unveiling alternate uniforms.  

“Kasey and I would spend a lot of Monday mornings running around, trying to outfit the guys for the movie poster shoots,” Heck said with a laugh. “Do you know how hard it is to find a sweater vest in Seattle? We went to Men’s Wearhouse, Tommy Bahama [for the ‘Step Brothers’ shoot]. We went all over, and we had to settle for button-downs and just a plain sweater.”

Anything — especially in the name, image and likeness era — to build the players’ personal brands and highlight their distinctive personalities.

To appeal to players past, present and future.

“I’m super, super close with these kids, and they’re close with our office,” Byers said. “These kids are in our office all the time hanging out. Just before you came out here, Ja’Lynn Polk and Taj Davis were hanging out with Hadley and I. They give us ideas and we ask their opinion on stuff. That’s the thing I’m most proud of: the relationship with the players and how we’re enhancing their brand at such a critical time with NIL. Being ahead in that space and being able to do that has been really important to me.”

In this industry, trust is proof of process.

Trust is a reward.

“When our players come to us and they want to talk about how their likeness is used and they have ideas and there’s a personal relationship like that, and I can pick up the phone and have coach DeBoer answer any time I call and we talk about it, that means we’re doing something right,” Byers added.