Katie Meza
Brand Leader, Educator, Community Advocate
Cricket Wireless
Cricket’s characters were created to bring some personality to wireless—and give customers something to smile about. They were colorful, optimistic and a little weird, becoming the faces of a brand built around making wireless more affordable.
As part of the original team behind the characters, I helped build and manage their visual world—from developing new characters to creating an ever-growing library of poses, expressions and interactions.
As Cricket evolved, so did the characters. We stopped treating them simply as mascots and started imagining them as people—with voices, personalities, quirks and lives of their own.
I helped create a new world inspired by Hollywood, where the characters became working actors starring in Cricket’s advertising. They lived, breathed, texted, talked and developed distinct personalities. The new platform, “Smile, You’re on Cricket,” gave us a simple mission: keep our customers smiling.
WHAT IF THEY COULD GO ANYWHERE?
With their personalities established, we started experimenting. The characters could become almost anything and go almost anywhere—as long as they still felt unmistakably Cricket.
We dropped them into new genres, cultural moments and completely unexpected visual worlds. They became movie stars, memes, video game characters and internet oddities. Each experiment pushed the character system a little further while testing just how flexible the Cricket universe could become.