Agency / Omelet — Client / Warner Bros — Brief + Key Assets — 2019
How do you add value to something perfect?
Creative Strategy
Certainly true among the hundreds of millions of fans of Harry Potter, and validated by Sony as Playstation's Most Anticipated Game of 2023. Four years prior, we were humbled to have been asked to figure out what to do with it. Specifically, what a core creative brief might look like to guide agency collaboration, and how to bring that idea to life in a single image — key art. With concept testing numbers quite literally off the charts, the brief was simple: how do we not screw this up?
Pulling on threads from concept testing, and listening closely during live sessions with developer Avalanche in Utah, we broadened our search for comparative games, extracting a trend that ran through blockbuster titles from Assassin's Creed to Call of Duty. There was something undeniably powerful about stepping into the past, even in a fictionalized or unfamiliar universe — the electrifying freedom of exploring history as it happens, and the possibility of shaping it with your every move, in ways unknown even to you.
The line and activations that followed somehow seamlessly spoke directly to franchise fans and non-fans in the same breath. The key art embodied this ideal, with a player standing cliffside looking out over a detailed shot of Hogwarts, mist in the foreground — adventure awaits.
Live the Unwritten helped Hogwarts Legacy soar to the the #1 spot on Steam, Xbox, and Playstation storefronts, and break the Twitch record for the most-watched single-player game with 1.3 millions viewers — all before the game officially launched. It went on to sell over 12 million copies in its first two weeks, making it WB's biggest game launch ever and cementing it as an early contender for Game of the Year. (From Omelet)
CDs: Jimmy Barker, Brianna Lohr + GCDs: Josh Smutko, Raul Montes + Account: Andrew Krensky + CSO: Pete Talaba + CEO: Thas Naseemuddeen + Christine Sasaki + Alex Heide + many more — please shout if I've been a jerk and left you off here!
