Extremely Viral “Gears of War” Commercial was Unintentional!

Gears of War was one of the high points in video games last year. “Mad World” for Gears of War was one of the best commercials from last year that broke out of the pack and truly summed up what compelling content, especial online, can be. Fan or not, everyone in the community has seen this commercial. Speaking at the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit, Mich Mathews, Senior Vice President of Central Marketing at Microsoft has come out admitting that they didn’t intend to create the mashup phenomenon it generated. She spend the day discussing the effects of building reach through information sharing by the customer with the Gears of War commercial as an example. Check out her video here.

The ideal campaign may get two times, four times, even ten times more of that reach via pass along and remixing. We got more than 700 community-created mashups that are being posted on YouTube that have now been viewed over a million times. This type of passionate engagement with the brand we think helped make Gears of War the No. 1-selling videogame last holiday season and, indeed, has helped to make it the fastest selling videogame of all time.”

She then goes on to spill the beans. “Now, one dirty little secret here that I have to confess, we didn’t create this ad for this kind of customer-generated content, and I have to say, though, it’s something certainly now that we factor in when we’re going through that creative process.

This type of passionate engagement with the brand we think helped make Gears of War the No. 1-selling videogame last holiday season and, indeed, has helped to make it the fastest selling videogame of all time. Now, one dirty little secret here that I have to confess, we didn’t create this ad for this kind of customer-generated content, and I have to say, though, it’s something certainly now that we factor in when we’re going through that creative process.

What’s interesting to note here is that they were simply creating a great commercial for their video game and it ended up going viral. The lesson here is if you create compelling content, give your users the tools and support them along the way then there is no telling how far and wide your product can go.