Long Arc Storytelling:
A Four Year Campaign at E3
Overview
Every year the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is the place to be for all things in videogames. Starting in 2009, Access began hosting a party at the convention to give media, game developers and industry experts a chance to meet, relax and drink.
My Role
Concept development, design and execution of a creative campaign to generate interest and attendance from an audience that was notoriously exhausted from a long day on the trade show floor. I handled everything from the art direction, design and copywriting to the HTML email and print production.
Concept
Given the videogame focused audience, but not wanting to tie the concept to a single game genre or trend was the first challenge. We needed an idea that was flexible and modular to provide lots of opportunities to adjust the story every year.
The final concept was to use robots as the main foil between the other two characters in the story: the agency and the audience. The category of "robots" was large and flexible enough to allow us to paint them with any story we wanted to tell. Robots have also played a large part in videogames and would certainly get the attention of the audience.
2009
Invitation
Event Badges
Initial Results
Initial feedback was very positive with the gaming website Bitmob (RIP) even running a post on the invitation.
The Logo
With the success of the first event, the team needed an official name and logo. While the name was bland by most standards, I was able to design a logo that combined elements into something immediately recognizable and memorable.
2010
The next year we wanted to continue the story (and the conversation) with the audience, so we picked up right where we left off — telling the story of our robots and their adventures.
Invite
Event Badges
2011
Invite
2012
Invite
Summary
After four years, the agency's priorities changed and they stopped hosting the E3 events. I'm sure the campaign could have continued due to the flexibility of the core idea and the assets I built along the way.
Overall, it was a huge success, generating awareness for the agency (and it's videogame clients) with the exact audiences they were trying to reach. Attendance and demand for the event grew every year. Direct feedback from several of the attendees was that they looked forward to each new chapter arriving in their inbox every April.
