Marvel | Contest of Champions
Work done at Teak in 2017
Marvel: Contest of Champions — Mortal Kombat with Marvel Super Heroes. On your mobile device. --
It’s an addictive combination that clearly works: in its first ten months on the App Store after launching in 2014, the game had grossed over $100m. To this day M:CoC remains one of the top grossing apps on the App Store, regularly capturing that coveted number 1 spot.
The developer, mobile gaming powerhouse Kabam, reached out to us to create a video ad campaign that would bring the good fight to new players and demographics around the world.
With over 90 million installs, basically everyone who plays mobiles games has given M:CoC a shot. Our challenge was to come up with a video ad campaign that could help Kabam extend their reach to untouched audiences—suburban moms and dads, bridging millennials, executives—while maintaining a firm grasp on the core of Marvel’s brand. The second challenge was that Kabam wanted to be able to test, refine, and change these videos depending on how they performed. Meaning they wanted them to be modular. So our concepts had to be flexible enough so that they could be reordered on the fly.
We landed on three concepts. The first was Looking for a real contest? in which we contrasted typical thumb-related games that fall flat with the epic and mighty battles of M:CoC. We let the heroes be the heroes.
The second concept was Real Super Heroes, where we showed regular people saving the day with pretend powers, like silly string Spider-Dad and Captain Trashcan-lid.
And the third was The Beat Down Show, a SportsCenter type show where caricatures of different fighting experts (a female MMA fighter, a preschool teacher, a Russian Hockey player, and a Karate Sensei) came together to break down the best beat downs in the game. Sounds pretty silly. And it was.
Kevin has no memory of his life before copywriting. It has been said that he arrived on Earth in a small altoids tin, along with a receipt for sungalasses. However, based on interviews, two weeks of archival research, and machine analysis of the scars and abrasions on his elbows and knees, it can be said with a confidence interval of 95% that before his current life he was for many millenia an amoeba, a wooden spoon, and then a teacup.