Gears of War 3: Brothers to the End

Team members: Pierre Lipton - Executive Creative Director, Jaime Diskin - Creative Director, Tom Zukoski - Associate Creative Director, Justin Pedone - Senior Copywriter, Dustin Blouse - Senior Art Director, Vicente Montelongo - Senior Designer, Chris Ryan - Copywriter , Sherine Kazim - Senior Interaction Designer, James Jenkins - Group Account Director, Julia Jahn - Management Supervisor, Clayton Lee - Account Supervisor, Kaitlyn Greer - Account Coordinator, Nancy Cardillo - Executive Producer, Michael Ramirez - Project Manager, Ashley D’Amour - Strategist, Justin Petersen - Associate Director of Creative Development, Jonathan Cipriano - Senior Creative Developer, Jeff Titus - Associate Director of Technology, Terry Lee - Senior Creative Developer, Scott Hurlbert - Technical Architect, Kenji Ogi - Senior Software Engineer, Matt Law - Senior Motion Graphics Designer, Jake Hawley - Senior Motion Designer, Payam Cherchian - Senior Analyst, Gearoid O’Flynn - QA Manager, Tigran Azaryan - QA Engineer , Aladino Debert - Director, Michael Shores - Executive Producer, Ken Dooley - Line Producer, Todd Miller - Editor, David Bass - Music Manager, Alex Banks - Musician

About this entry

Brothers to the End
www.gearsofwar.com/brotherstotheend

Brief
For the launch of Gears of War 3, our challenge was to excite our core fans while giving fans of other shooters a reason to get involved.

Execution
We etched images of brotherhood from the Gears of War trilogy into three walls using live explosives. To see them, fans were asked to team-up with the one Facebook friend they knew could count on. Teams of brothers then worked together to detonate each chapter of our story, scrambling to get their hands on exclusive content.

Result
We united brothers from around the world and turned our core fans into ambassadors of the game. Over a 30 day period, we saw over 1.7 million individual interactions, many from fans of rival shooters. Our campaign not only pushed Gears of War 3 to a record setting 1.3 million pre-orders, but helped it reach over 3 million copies sold in the first week.

The case for why this entry should win a Shorty

Gears of War 3 had a central theme: brotherhood. In this blockbuster video game franchise, teamwork is paramount: players have to work together to defeat often overwhelming odds. Our tagline, "Brothers to the End," brought this theme to life, as did our campaign in which gamers were asked to team up with a brother to take part. They did so by using Facebook to choose the one (and only one) friend who wouldn’t let them down. Then together, teams answered calls over a three-week period to unlock a series of detonations. As expected, people who had been playing more recent first-person shooters reached out to the person they played with most. This created a direct user-to-user testimonial and brought new fans to the franchise, resulting in over 1.7 million individual interactions.