Branded content is exploding and it is increasingly difficult to break through. In the video game category, creating a branded long-form trailer meant to entertain gamers is nothing new. However they tend to be heavy on celebrity cameos and blockbuster music tracks, and light on entertaining storytelling. To break through, we would create content that stood apart of game marketing conventions by breaking the fourth wall, being hyper self-aware and showing our audience that game marketing can be (almost) as much fun as playing the actual game.

Fizzie is a character in Sunset Overdrive who mocks modern marketing conventions. He’s the evil mascot for the corporation, Fizzco. He’s also a giant parade balloon. We identified an opportunity to leverage this larger-than-life character in marketing early in our campaign. The goal was to get this fictional mascot for a video game into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on the most corporate marketing day of the year. The #LetFizzieIn campaign encouraged Fizzie’s Twitter community to rally behind their favorite corporate mascot. We also tapped into all Xbox owned channels, including the Xbox console dashboard to showcase Fizzie’s petition.

The Sunset Overdrive live action trailer received over 4.5 million views and is the most viewed M-rated trailer of all time on Xbox’s YouTube channel. The game’s lovable villain, Fizzie, amounted a following on twitter that tripled in less than two months during his social campaign to make it into the Thanksgiving Day Parade.