LEGO® DC Super-Villains
International branding and promotion of 2018’s AAA LEGO Games title, working direct with Warner Bros. Games in Burbank, Los Angeles.
A fresh new look and approach was needed to re-invigorate the LEGO gaming franchise, which this time was focusing on the bad guys, because after all: It’s good to be bad!
A carefully planned and phased brand campaign, to tease, reveal and deliver the key USPs of the game, with trailers, key visuals and social activations, to a large fan base split over multiple audience channels.
Breaking the mould of what is expected for a LEGO title, we proposed using a disruptive and chaotic visual language.
Brand Pillars:
Villainy × Chaos × Humour
Key-Art
The approach:
Deliver the new story
Lean in to the villains theme
Establish a different creative approach
Announce Trailer
Conceptualised, directed a project managed CGI trailer, liaising with Warner Bros. Games in Los Angeles (client) and Plastic Wax in Sydney (vfx studio)
Point of Sale
Conceptualised & project managed point of sale toolkit for markets to adapt, localise and chose from.
Touch-screen Exhibition Kiosks
Highlighting the key USP of the game, where the player creates and plays as their own unique Super-Villain, the kiosk invited users to create their own unique Super-Villain live at E3, San Diego Comic Con, PAX Seattle & New York Comic Con aswell as other shows worldwide, and share social channels.
WebGL / ThreeJS software development
Hardware sourcing and logistics
Kiosk branding
Social media facilitation
Interface Design
A simple and quick 2 step interface, where the user taps to add facial features, hairstyles, weapons, super-suits and backgrounds to their own unique Super-Villain, before tapping through to the end-card screen, where they can add super-powers and enter their email address to receive shareable images.
Create your Super-Villain here… (Takes a while to load – be patient!)
Social Sharing Images Emailed to User
The kiosks provided a fun engagement for passing traffic of Warner Bros. Games Stalls at major gaming expos world-wide and served to get over the main USP of the new LEGO game, as well as capturing email addresses for further promotion and providing content for users to share socially and further spread the message.
Online Advertising Toolkit
Ad templates to be localised for EMEA territories. Sub 5Mb online ads built for DoubleClick to run on DBM Networks.
Results
The bright green look and feel of the key-art massively helped with stand-out on shelf, and the irreverent tone and communications inspired a somewhat fatigued LEGO gaming audience to propel the game into the top ten gaming charts. Sales remained strong and engagement socially with the brand doubled post-release with promotion of DLCs and a further support.
The branding campaign was also nominated for the following award:
FINALIST
Best Marketing Campaign of the Year
Family | Rated E