Newport Beach, Calif., April 18, 2011— SPARKHOUSE, a full-service video marketing, advertising and media production agency, was recently awarded the Bronze OC ADDY for Best Interactive Online Campaign from the American Advertising Federation.
The ADDY Awards is the advertising industry’s largest and most representative competition, attracting over 50,000 entries every year. The Orange County ADDY competition brought together the best local talent to recognize and reward creative excellence in the art of advertising.
The award-winning campaign is a branded web series for XFX, a cutting-edge graphics card company. The XFX Secret Weapon Series has been viewed online hundreds of thousands of times—watch it here.
“We wanted to combine entertainment with classic gaming plots and themes and create characters that XFX customers can relate to,” says David Faloss II, co-founder and creative director at SPARKHOUSE. “For this video to be really fun and generate the most conversation and engagement online, we knew we’d have to make it as real as possible.”
SPARKHOUSE created Facebook pages, YouTube accounts, and gamer tags for each character of the web series, allowing consumers to organically interact with the brand long before the launch of the first episode. The plot is based around the theft of XFX’s flagship product, the 5970 graphics card. To garner even more buzz, SPARKHOUSE actually posted a 5970 on eBay, leading viewers to believe perhaps the heist was real. The blogosphere lit up with conversation and the bidding on the “stolen” graphics card reached nearly $1 million.
From the buzz created by the viral video and gorilla marketing SPARKHOUSE launched a web series and micro site title “XFX Secret Weapon.” The branded films have reached hundreds of thousands of views since being launched on Youtube and Facebook.
In all, the multifaceted campaign included: a viral teaser, a six-episode web series, an online commercial, an interactive microsite, character Facebook accounts, and cross-brand marketing with e-retailer Newegg.com. The campaign’s case study is now on youtube – watch it here.
About the 23rd Annual ADDY Awards
Conducted annually by the American Advertising Federation (AAF), the local ADDY Awards is the first of a three-tier, national competition. Concurrently, all across the country, local entrants vie for recognition as the very best in their markets. At the second tier, local winners compete against other winners in one of 14 district competitions. District winners are then forwarded to the third tier, the national ADDY Awards competition. Entry in the local ADDY competition is the first step toward winning a national ADDY.