Gears of War Stages Direct Mail Promo
If the holiday season seems a little more apocalyptic than usual this year, blame the makers of video and computer games, who are filling our TV screens with images of invading alien craft that blot out Manhattan, and intergalactic dogfights around the Eiffel Tower.
“Gears of War 2,” one of the most anticipated game sequels, ran some of those ad-mageddon TV spots — but went beyond that to generate buzz. Working with game maker Epic and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, digital marketing agency AKQA reached out to bloggers and game media. They sent out large, heavy cogs to these identified influentials; each of the gears was inscribed with a unique code to be entered at a pre-launch microsite.
“We wanted to create a tangible item to energize the hard core and seed it into the wild,” says John Jakubowski, AKQA group creative director. “Users could then use the codes to release content on the Last Day site — videos, graphics or audio — that would piece together the story and set up ‘Gears 2.’”
Most of the 1,000 cogs were mailed out, some cleverly customized like the one embedded in an old book. Others were hidden in locations scattered across the globe from California to London to Budapest.
Some of the tags were meant to be used together; AKQA learned from an earlier promotion for “Halo 3” to rely on bloggers to find out who had received specific cogs with the pieces of the access code and publish the info.
“If they’re rabid enough, and even if they hate each other, communities will come together and cross-pollinate information for the larger good,” Jakubowski says.
The buzz worked, apparently, and “Gears of War 2” sold 2 million copies in its first week of release.
But Jakubowski says the bar to engage and energize gamers is getting pretty high. “These hard-core fans are unreal. We would go through creative executions we were convinced would take them weeks to work out, and they had the info in a matter of minutes.”
