Work

Sega – Beta-7

The Beta-7 story was an elaborate marketing campaign dreamed up while at Wieden + Kennedy NY created with The Blair Witch Project filmmakers Chelsea Pictures directing group Haxan. Through fake forum posts leading up to the Beta-7 blog, we created a video game fan who turned from a beta testing hopeful to an unfortunate lab rat experiencing mysterious side effects. Websites, security camera videos, voicemails, e-mails, classified ads and many more elements were created to tell the story, with blog posts appearing in real-time. At the time, several websites and gamers fell for the story, with the fake websites created by Wieden + Kennedy accumulating more than 2 million hits. SEGA’s sales of the game reportedly exceeded projections by 20%, despite real-life delays which were not caused by the Beta-7 incident. The campaign won several awards, including a Grand CLIO award, a gold Pencil at The One Show Interactive, and a “Big Idea chair” at the Andys.

Sportlife

Sportlife’s chewing gum wanted to be a brand ahead of the masses, aiming at youngsters and using ‘unexpected freshness’ as leading theme. We created new extreme sports to underline this concept, like Yetiball: snowbording as a snowball. Communication was focussed on commercials, interviews, a lot of fake websites, a MTV documentary, a press conference and even G-Sus t-shirts.

In line with this concept is Akaduro, a sport developed to introduce Sportlife’s Red Cinnamon. The Akaduro myth tells that it has been refined by Japanese martial arts fighters, which was spotted by Sportlife who wanted to develop a special chewing gum in this context.

These campaigns went viral, combined mass and online media, causing discussions in webblogs and creating a buzz towards the target group: youngsters. Sportlife’s market share rose significantly after the campaign. Retailers even asked permission to sell Red Cinnamon.

Nike

Absolut

Stylepit

Protest

Doritos

Sprinter x Nascar

Electronic Arts