League of Legends: Wild Rift Battle of Baron
Riot Games

We wanted to do something different for the Wild Rift expansion into Vietnam, Oceania, Taiwan, Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, and Russia. We turned YouTube Live into a collaborative multiplayer game experience for fans all over the world. In the course of this, we kinda accidentally broke Youtube Live functionality for all of Vietnam during the stream, but Google wasn’t angry at all, they loved the concept and only wanted to do more.

Anyone, anywhere, could join the biggest Baron battle in history, typing in live chat to take down the beast. We used a combination of text recognition AI patched through a custom-built Unity environment that allowed “players” to do direct damage to Baron or call in support from their favorite champions. The global gaming community worked together to defeat Baron Nashor in a way that’s never been done before.

Working together with BBH Singapore, our team created the whole project, from conception to delivery, in just five weeks. The timing was extremely tight, but this was a true labor of love; as gamers ourselves, it was exciting to work on a project for such a big title.

LoL: Wild Rift Launch Campaign
Riot Games

Everyone who has followed Riot over the years knows that the studio has a passion for music. The go-to has always been K-Pop, Hip-Hop, Imagine Dragons (again), or some super epic orchestral with a 200-piece symphony but never 1960’s British Garage Rock. Okay, yes, there is a solid verse in there from a German rapper BUT it is still mostly a riff on the Kinks classic. Wild Rift needed a way to claim its own identity and find a voice different from anything League would ever try and this is where we ended up.

Launching Wild Rift was an amazing undertaking, especially as we were launching a game at the hight of Covid. Compounding this, we also were launching the game in regional waves starting first in APAC. Our goal was to make a huge splash in the moment and then work hard to see to the following launches all while keeping players excited for what was coming next.

LoL Franchise: Lunar New Year 2022
Riot Games

Lunar New Year is just insane. It is incredibly hard to grasp the scale and importance of the holiday fully; it’s like Christmas combined with the Superbowl but covered in red paint. Riot decided to drop this into my lap along with an international team in spread across 5 different countries to put together the largest campaign the studio had ever done up to that point. Every country took on a different aspect of the campaign with myself put unsteadily in the driver’s seat. This campaign turned into a whole graduate program about the ins and outs of advertising in East Asia and how to work with so many different cultures and their competing goals.

When our campaign first landed we were told that the then President of Singapore loved the CG trailer. One of her children was a fan of Riot and showed it to her and she apparently got a little misty-eyed by the end. As far as I’m concerned this is now in textbooks and etched into the history of a great country.

At the end of the day, I am incredibly happy with what landed and the global results and player sentiment were through the roof.

Clash of Clans: You and this Army
Supercell Games

When I first started working at Supercell it was already clear that Clash of Clans was going to be a massive hit. I have so many stories of what it was like to work on this product but the wonderful CG commercials we produced in 2013 and early 2014 share the same attitude and genuine love for the game that everyone at the company had.

This was also my first experience working on such a massive, multi-million dollar campaign and all of the preparation and planning that such an undertaking requires. This included explaining the rules of American Football to our Finnish CEO which I’m pretty sure he still has no interest in understanding.

This entire campaign began with a simple question: “What would happen if Pengu was in the real world?” What would he do? Where would he go? Would people want to meet him?

We all had a good laugh about it and promptly forgot that it was even a thing. That was until someone on my team found a company in Southeast Asia that could build us Pengu costumes at a frighteningly reasonable cost. We jumped at the opportunity and then built our entire ad campaign around the fact we were going to have real life Pengus running around the APAC region.

Of course, once one office heard we were making a Pengu costume EVERY OFFICE wanted one. We ended up producing 14 Pengu costumes, sending them all over the world.

In the end Pengu visited 5 different continents, 22 countries, and had a lovely time hanging out with Steve Aoki. He even was awarded the Presidential Medal of Peace from the President of Indonesia.

LoL: Wild Rift Soul Fighter
Riot Games

This is likely my favorite Wild Rift campaign. The entire concept started with the idea of “Could we make a sports drink in League” and then that is exactly what we did. The entire idea was to build a moment for Draven to be the star of the show and shill his sugar water and it was just magnificent. We even took the concept and expanded out to other champions by giving Yasuo his own cereal Yasu-O’s. Using the box as our packaging we shipped lucky players and influencers their own Tournament of Souls kit including a ticket to the tournament (if they can magically find a way to get there), unique trading cards, a coupon for one free six-pack of Soul Juice, signed posers and a vintage shirt of everyone’s favorite champion Draven.

Clash of Clans: Wizard TV Moment
Riot Games

The wonderful Wizard Campaign. Clash of Clans was amazingly coming into its voice and our creative campaigns were beginning to find their own special groove. This is when the Director of Brand decided to blow it all up and asked us a pretty simple question “Hey, do you think the Wizard is bald?”

This not insignificant question led us down a rabbit hole (and an actual rabbit at one point) pulling inside jokes from all over the community and ended with us in a meeting room in Helskini across from the entire Clash game team asking if it would be okay to give a character an afro. They didn’t even blink, had a quick chat in Finnish, and turned to us and said “seems funny but don’t ask us to put it in the game.” From there we created several amazing animated ads and even a short-lived selection of hair care products.

Supercell was obsessed with putting ads on TV and this set in particular found its way onto ESPN where they played constantly. The player base loved them so much that we spun out the Wizard into his own comic series so we could continue his adventures.

Hay Day: Cowboy TV Campaign
Supercell Games

Craig Robinson was honestly up for anything. If we asked him to do a take slightly differently or react to non-existent CGI pig he would shrug and always go for it. The song, however, let’s just say he had a lot of questions about it. Once he got into the recording booth he was completely on fire.

I will shout from the top of any building that Hay Day is my favorite Supercell game, hands down. Everything about it is fun, unique, and heartwarming. This campaign was focused on growing the Hay Day brand by focusing on the strange and wonderful properties in the game. We completely revamped the presentation of the game working with The Mill and Legendary Studios to bring our cartoon world to life.

This remains one of my absolute favorite campaigns I have ever worked on. Just getting to pitch that we should get John Schnider (Bo Duke himself!) to do the tag VO is one of the greatest moments of my life.

When players think back to their favorite League of Legends alternate universes Star Guardian is usually in the top 5. It was the first major skin line to reach beyond the confines of the PC game. Star Guardians helped kickstart what we now think of as the “League Ecosystem,” the myriad of different cultures that make up the fandom of League of Legends.

And I ran into that particular burning building screaming a war cry.

Okay, hear me out; Riot Games is a great company, they are the pinnacle of creativity for game as a service companies. However, to this day, they only like to operate in their comfort zone. They have adopted a very ridged marketing playbook, one that had served them very well but that was starting to show its age. This is where I rolled in with a fist full of research and a determination to get stakeholders in the company to recognize that our players spend more time on their phones than playing our games.

Long story short, I got them to let me try some big ideas in formats that were completely new to the company. We built our standard CG trailers in vertical format so they would play better on Instagram and Tiktok. We invested into a long form Instagram filter that included a card collection mechanic. We also partnered with some of the most popular manga artists on Tiktok to create one of a kind art of our characters.

We took a big swing and it paid off, the views on our social posts easily outpaced our normal YouTube numbers and we saw a massive increate in followers of our accounts. We opened the door for Riot to finally catch up to our fans and have a much more direct relationship with them going forward,.

LoL Wild Rift: Thresh Unbound
Riot Games

Due to content restrictions in China it is really hard to put an evil glowing skeleton into your game. So, how can you prove to 40 million players that the character they know and love is still the same even though he had to go through a massive glow-up? By doubling down on the fact that at the end of the day, he is WAY more fucking evil than they ever could have imagined.

After the excitement that was Ruination 2021 summer event, Wild Rift was tasked with building an epilogue of sorts. This featured one of the most iconic characters in all of League of Legends, Thresh, introducing his new human form.

This spawned out of a requirement given to us by our product and brand teams. Our task was to build a compelling campaign that would address this change head-on and build positive player sentiment. This was very much not an easy task so I partnered with the League IP and storytelling team to create a short film that showed Thresh is still incredibly evil and helped make a compelling case for moving his lore along. We pulled inspiration heavily from classic Hammer horror films staring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing to build a villain that is undeniably fun to watch.

Player sentiment was overwhelmingly positive after the launch of the CG. It was so positive that the creative team was then tasked with re-designing Thresh’s in-game character model and splash art work to match the CG, something unheard of within the walls of Riot.

CD: Greg Killion
Dir: Dustin Wicke
Pro: Brian Reiss
Animation: Little Zoo
House: Axis Animation

LoL: Wild Rift Power Spike '22
Riot Games

Wild Rift’s (technically) Second Anniversary was a moment we wanted to fully celebrate with players. We looked back on the past two years of content and also conducted interviews with players from all over the world to figure out what makes the game so special. From there we built a campaign that lasted two full months, making an exciting moment of celebration for every week.

All of this culminated in a special event for our Devs where we hosted an auction of fan art specifically created by the player community. We shot a short film around it and also pushed a large social campaign showing off the art and even having an actual art critic talk about each piece. Players loved it so much that we actually won a Webby for the campaign.

LoL Wild Rift: Sentinels of Light
Riot Games

The theme of League of Legends in 2021 was to build a huge moment around the lore of the game. League had not had any major story movement in several years and the plan was to give players a year of major changes to the status quo in the world of Runeterra culminating in the launch of our first major entertainment project season 1 of Arcane.

While League of Legends campaign was primarily based around two big-budget CGs Wild Rift would focus on social engagement built around tactile mobile executions. This would allow the two products to complement each other and give Wild Rift room to find its footing with its growing player base. This would become a constant challenge to navigate between the two products until the decision was made to let Wild Rift tell their own stories and have their own champion lineups during major events.

This campaign also marks the moment we decided to explore social more actively and began taking major swings into the space with unique and highly technical creative tactics. We built partnerships with YouTube and Meta using their latest ad tech as part of the campaign. This included immersive 3D AR environments on Instagram and 180-degree CG animated videos that worked both in VR, on social media, and on desktop.

LoL: Wild Rift Ekko's Arrival
Riot Games

I’m an Ekko main so getting the chance to work on his launch was something I relished the chance to do. And then…..well…..it got cut back quite a bit. We wanted to make something that played into his power fantasy while also giving us a healthy dose of attitude. This is another in our low-cost CG series but we were able to work with some fantastic animators to bring more life to the characters.

LoL: Wild Rift PROJECT Mobile
Riot Games

This was our first major skin launch for Wild Rift and also our first effort using our new cinematic pipeline developed in-house at Riot. This project was incredibly exciting as it was our first major effort at building hype for the title.

LoL: Wild Rift Yordles Campaign
Riot Games

Teemo, a fan-favorite champion, was coming to Wild Rift! We introduced him to the world through an Augmented Reality filter that offered more than interaction, but exclusive sneak peeks of the game’s next update.

LoL: Wild Rift Rise from the Deep
Riot Games

Building off of the Broken Blades campaign the Wild Rift team continued to explore low-cost cinematics that could support champion launches. For this campaign, we launched two classic League champs. We produced this short film that would show off a bit of the lore for both champions and also help build the attitude and storytelling style of Wild Rift.

LoL: Wild Rift North and South America Launch
Riot Games

The launch schedule of Wild Rift was divided up into waves focusing on the different major gaming regions of the world. Our third official launch of Wild Rift was focused on bringing the game to North and South America. Our major markets were Brazil, Central America, and finally the US and Canada.

LoL: Wild Rift China Launch
Riot Games

Working with Blur Studios we created a new animated short to celebrate the launch of Wild Rift in China, our biggest launch to date. We wanted to create an extension off of the original “You Really Got Me” animated cinematic that kicked off the game in 2020 to give our Chinese players something unique to continue the story of Jinx and friends.

This is, at least at the time of me writing this, the trailer that accompanied the largest game launch in history with over 80 million downloads in the first month. I still can’t completely comprehend how large of a campaign this was but it opened up a whole new world for Riot and Wild Rift.

War Dragons: Atlas Campaign
Pocketgems Games

War Dragons has been a fantastic success since its first launch in spring 2015. It burst onto the scene with a unique identity and engaging gameplay that has continued to evolve over the past 5 years. I started working on the game in 2017 and my first focus was to grow the excitement around the game’s first major update called Atlas. Included here is the launch anthem that we ran across social and a limited run on TV.

Wild Beyond: Game Launch
Pocketgems Games

It’s BEYOND WILD! It’s WILD BEYOND! This project was a ton of fun while also representing a massive challenge to myself and the team. We had a game that was fun but no clear voice to build a brand around. Where we ended up was a wildly colorful and exciting place where our characters came to life, and in some cases ended up taking over our campaign. We focused mostly on our social channels and our work became more and more graphic to stand out on Facebook and Instagram.

Lunar Beasts 2021
Riot Games

Lunar New Year has always been a challenge for Riot and this particular project was an attempt to combine style and tradition in a new and exciting way. We created both a custom cinematic as well as an in-depth event trailer to introduce the event to players.

The highlight was working with clothing designers from Bosideng to outfit our champions in stylish threads for the campaign and in-game cosmetics.

LoL Wild Rift: Broken Blades
Riot Games

Wild Rift Broken Blades was our second run at doing a smaller activation focused on the launch of two iconic champions. The goal of the campaign was to create anticipation for the release of Irelia and Riven while also building up the power fantasy of these two champions for newer players to the League of Legends ecosystem. The creative was designed around lower-cost CG leveraging the available assets from our product team. A constant pressure on Riot has been the expectation that we MUST produce CGs for every single marketing beat and the Wild Rift team wanted to explore if we could do that in a more cost-effective way that would still excite players.

War Dragons: Young Love
Pocketgems Games

The set of ads was based on a forum thread on the War Dragons community site. Players shared stories about how the game connected them to others and in one very special case, started a relationship that we celebrated in-game when the happy couple was married. These ads lived primarily on our social channels but they ended up have the best response as YouTube ads. We have since recut them into shorter versions and we even put out the call for more funny stories from players to turn into fun content for the comunity.

Boom Beach: Game Launch
Supercell Games

Boom Beach was my first product launch while at Supercell. It was a game that was developed completely in the shadow of its older brother Clash of Clans so the focus on making a big splash was not nearly as vital. We had a small budget to play with and we decided that before we started building a major TV campaign we would see how the game performed for the first few months. My direction for this campaign, and for Boom Beach in general, was completely inspired by war comics from the 60’s and 70’s. I even mocked up fake comic covers that we printed up and hung on the walls as inspiration for the team.

Dominations: Game Launch
Nexon Games

Dominations is a wonderfully odd game where Cleopatra can lead armies from inside a Tiger Tank. The challenge was how the heck do we sell a game where you literally upgrade your nation through time. The launch campaign focused on the player instead and how, through their tactical and economic genius, they can make their own history. The campaign, app store presentation and even the key art where all focused on showcasing this mashup of history and how much fun it could be. I am really proud of Dominations and how all of the creative shaped up and also how it performed.

Clash of Clans: Performance Creatives
Supercell Games

Included here are examples of all of the Performance Marketing assets I developed for Clash of Clans. Everything from Out of Home print posters to mobile interstitial banners.

Hay Day Performance Creatives
Supercell Games

Hay Day is just fun and it was more fun to work on. Included here you will find a selection of social and performance creatives that accompanied the TV campaign as well as evergreen creatives that are still used to this day.

War Dragons Performance Creatives
Pocketgems Games

The exciting thing about the performance ads produced is that we focused on trying to tell a story featuring our main character Ash. Over the course of the past few years, this story has grown and our players have come to look forward to each new ad.

Wild Beyond Performance Creatives
Pocketgems Games

Here you will see a collection of Social and Performance creatives for Wild Beyond. These ads are the bread and butter of our marketing operation and are tested over and over again to make sure they are performing as best as they possibly can. We produced somewhere around 300+ unique ads during the initial soft launch and then during the first year of the game’s lifespan.

Heroes of War: Social Content
Nexon Games

Here you will find the ads for Heroes of War, a smaller game that didn’t quite make it big but was one of my first projects as a creative director. The direction for this game was based on heavy metal records, specifically the artwork that decorates the records. The question we asked ourselves before approving any ad was “can we see this airbrushed on the side of a van?” If the answer was “hell yes” then we knew we had done a good job.

Super Senso: Game Launch
Turbo Games

Super Senso was a really fun game to work on and became a bit of a sleeper hit. Originally, I worked on the title as part of Nexon M and later as a consultant. My focus was on the overall branding and presentation and later the first round of messaging.

The Invoker class of dragons was our first major addition to War Dragons since the launch of Atlas. To celebrate its launch we wanted to build a series of social posts that players could get excited about. We created the entire video project internally using the incredibly talented illustration and animations teams at Pocket Gems. Personally, this is a project that I am very proud of, mostly due to the amount of arm bending and ear twisting it took to bring the pieces of this project together.