Sundance has long been known for expertly curated films and as an incubator for some of today’s most beloved filmmakers, but a thoughtful and passionate audience is just as meaningful an asset. A great film carries its audience emotionally through a story. A great audience member will meet a film halfway, reserving judgment before they’ve seen a film, and as they watch it, consider the intention, context, and their own relationship to the world of the film. Independent film thrives on subverting expectations and formulas, and this can only be achieved with an attuned audience. 
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2020 was the first year Sundance needed to ‘sell’ festival tickets and convince most of the audience to attend. But it was also an opportunity to expand and diversify the audience – to build a bigger tent, but also to bring audiences and art closer together, creating an active and engaged community who are a part of a cultural moment even when they’re not physically there.

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“Together like never before,” paired with cinematic imagery of untraditional audience members, addressed the unique challenges of this year while inviting in a new generation of film lovers. We worked with the Institute’s archives team to find moments from the festival that hit the right emotional beats and communicated that while SFF would be different this year, the reimagined format came with long-term and meaningful change.

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Together Like Never Before

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2021 Sundance Film Festival 

Right now, countless mom &amp; pop companies and local independent businesses that are critical to the cultural fabric of Los Angeles are scrambling for survival. More than 90% of L.A. businesses employ fewer than 20 workers. It’s home to more minority and women-owned businesses than any other city in the country. The lucky few who were able to get small business emergency loans under the Paycheck Protection Program cannot spend it on marketing. That’s where “An Idea For L.A.” came in. 
For the first work to come out of the initiative, Battery teamed with animation house Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (creators of Robot Chicken) and actor/comedian Donald Faison to launch a marketing campaign free of charge for Seoul Sausage, a popular L.A. food brand that is struggling to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
The Seoul Sausage campaign is the first of these pro-bono campaigns to launch.  It is a series of short comic spots created by Battery that has debuted online featuring Faison performing hilarious voiceovers as a talking Korean BBQ sausage. Best known for his leading role as Dr. Chris Turk in the ABC/NBC comedy-drama Scrubs, the role of Murray in both the film and TV series Clueless, and most recently as Alex Evans in ABC’s Emergence, Faison also has offered his services pro-bono for the Seoul Sausage project.

Delicious AND Available

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Seoul Sausage 

It started with a ten-year, multi-million dollar commitment from RBC to empower young Canadians with the professional skills, networks, and experience needed to succeed in a drastically changing workforce.

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We brought the Future Launch initiative to life by rejecting the tropes of social responsibility campaigns. Those earnest, feel-good stories of corporations congratulating themselves on acts of do-goodery. Instead, the Dear Future campaign uses cinematic scale to hero the next generation of changemakers who are fearlessly running toward an uncertain future.

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Fear No Future

We brought the Future Launch initiative to life by rejecting the tropes of social responsibility campaigns. Those earnest, feel-good stories of corporations congratulating themselves on acts of do-goodery.

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Epic Games is a company that lives up to its name. It’s best known for Fortnite, the biggest cultural phenomenon in gaming in the 21st century. And its Unreal Engine has brought to life legendary worlds from Final Fantasy to Game of Thrones to The Mandalorian.
But over the last year, its lesser known digital storefront, Epic Games Store, has been steadily gaining ground on category goliath, Steam. To accelerate that growth in a big way, and give something awesome back to players around the world, Epic joined forces with Battery to create an unprecedented global event celebrating the gamer community.

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It all started by investing in the rights to some of the biggest games in the world &#8212; triple-A titles like Grand Theft Auto V, Civilization 6, and Borderlands: The Handsome Collection. Then, one by one, we set them free from a larger-than-life vault, revealing a new top-secret game each week, free for anyone to download and keep forever, with no strings attached.

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To unleash this juggernaut into the world, Battery and Havas Media set off a frenzy of speculation about upcoming titles in the vault with an unignorable campaign in 20 markets across North America, LATAM, Europe, and APAC, for a four-week blitz. On the first day, the store traffic was so insane that we had to pump the brakes on advertising because the site crashed in the first two minutes after getting 40 million requests per second, far beyond any of our projections. Overnight we saw 4x the number of new account sign-ups, and in that first week after we announced GTA 5 we drove a 245% increase in PC players.
The campaign blew all expectations out of the water, pushing the Epic Games Store to an average peak concurrent user count of 13 million, and its monthly active user total to more than 61 million. After four short weeks, that historic growth rate puts it within striking range of Steam, which if we’re keeping score has been around 15 years longer. And it’s been a boon to PC gamers, who have scooped up some of the most sought after titles for free. With that kind of fan love, the Epic Games Store is now living up to the outsize expectations of its name.

Generating Global Growth on An Epic Scale

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Epic Games Store

Epic Games is a company that lives up to its name. It’s best known for Fortnite, the biggest cultural phenomenon in gaming in the 21st century. Epic joined forces with Battery to create an unprecedented global event celebrating the gamer community.

<h2>Challenge</h2>
Between the recent rise of competition in the online Battle Royale gaming space and the heavy slate of premier titles rolling out this holiday season, we needed to break through and let the world of PlayStation gamers know that our coveted title, PUBG, was now available.
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<h2>Campaign</h2>
To announce the launch of PUBG on PlayStation, we created a fun, bold, and visually-driven campaign to cut through the saturated gaming space and hit home with our audience. We brought on Jordan Vogt-Roberts (Kong: Skull Island) to direct our film, as well as Jason Mitchell (Straight Outta Compton), and Nick Robinson (Jurassic World) as our leads with Chung-hoon Chung (Old Boy and IT) as our cinematographer to infuse our film with a heavy dose of cinematic action.
Together we crafted a campaign that landed heavily on cinematography, and choreography creating an action-packed, fun, and thrilling film touching on some of the emotions all gamers experience when playing the PUBG title.
We also worked closely with our media partners to extend our campaign beyond the TV screen into the hands of our target market by developing a digital, and social campaign that helped stir up excitement about the pending release of PUBG on the PlayStation console.

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<h2>Results</h2>
The campaign resulted in PUBG becoming the number one download for the PlayStation 4 during the month of December. The game handily beat out the previous month’s top dogs, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

PUBG

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Creating a cultural moment of pan-demonium

To announce the launch of PUBG on PlayStation, we created a fun, bold, and visually driven campaign to cut through the saturated gaming space and hit home with our audience.

BRIEF
Mortal Kombat was a beloved 27-year-old brand with a ton of equity, but it remained a hardcore fighting brand with a very specific consumer following. Our task – broaden sales to reach gamers of all types.
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INSIGHT
What is that we love about a fight? If someone ran down the halls anywhere – from a junior high to a rest home and yelled FIGHT! wouldn’t everyone try to get a look? From kids to the elderly, it’s a universal truth  – we cannot resist a good fight. And MK is the king of all fights.
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HOW
Mortal Kombat was a brand known for being over the top so we needed to create a campaign in the MK way by making the largest fight circle of all time. We scripted the campaign and hired one of the best production companies, MJZ, along with one of their top directors, Phil Joanou. We flew down to Mexico City and created an intense build-up where word spreads quickly about a fight.
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What begins as a hushed whisper quickly takes over the city.  Soon everyone from office workers and new dads to chess-playing seniors are swept up in a spontaneous, frenzied crowd to witness the fight of all fights. True to Mortal Kombat’s jaw-dropping graphics, aggressive spirit, the commercial is big, raw and over the top. Finish Him!
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RESULTS
The campaign set new sales records for this franchise and MKX was the fastest-selling title in WB’s history and became the #7 best selling console title of 2015.

Mortal Kombat X

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Revitializing a Dormant Brand

Mortal Kombat was a beloved 27-year-old brand with a ton of equity, but it remained a hardcore fighting brand with a very specific consumer following. Our task – broaden sales to reach gamers of all types.

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After shaking up the traditional underwear market with a unique combination of comfortable fabrics in cheeky (sorry) designs, reasonably priced and sold directly to consumers, MeUndies set out to scale its subscription business by evolving to a membership model.
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With new members-only collections and exclusive offers on a growing portfolio of products, the program was built to put the MeUndies community first. So it was only natural to create a campaign that features real content from the social feeds of this community of real people, with real love for the brand and their own bodies, to launch the service.

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MeUndies

Join The Comfortably Fun

After shaking up the traditional underwear market with a unique combination of comfortable fabrics in cheeky (sorry) designs, reasonably priced and sold directly to consumers, MeUndies set out to scale its subscription business by evolving to a membership model.

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The campaign is based on a universal truth. Change or die. Whether you’re a superhero or a mere mortal, those who emerge victorious adapt to new enemies, evolve their methods, and embrace change.

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To prove the point, we took the most revered superheroes and plunged them into a ferocious, claustrophobic battle where they have no choice but to adapt. Legendary heroes like SuperMan and Flash are presented in a way never seen before. Reduced to their most basic, savage selves they commit unspeakable acts of violence for their survival and beliefs. The intimate and visceral approach is reinforced by a dark, minimal visual style and highly detailed, reality-based sound design that reinforces the frantic urgency of the fight. As a result, not all of the action is seen, but every blow is felt to the core. The close quarter nature of the fight drives home the truth that conflict is inescapable. At some point, the fight finds you and you either engage or become a casualty.

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Adapt and Survive

INJUSTICE 2

The campaign is based on a universal truth. Change or die. Whether you’re a superhero or a mere mortal, those who emerge victorious adapt to new enemies, evolve their methods, and embrace change.

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Warner Bros came to us with a simple but challenging proposition – broaden the reach of the Arkham Knight game beyond the hardcore fans of Batman and sell it to the casual gamer. When WB said ‘casual’, they meant really, really casual. They wanted to appeal to people who didn’t even own a PlayStation or Xbox. We had to first drive console sales in order to drive game sales.

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So the campaign clearly couldn’t be about the features or the polygon count. It had to get to the core of why people identify with Batman. After all, Batman isn’t your typical superhero. He’s a human, like us. The only difference is 10,000 push-ups and about a billion dollars. As a result of our campaign, Arkham Knight was a top 5 title and is the fastest-selling game in WB’s history.

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Batman Arkham Knight

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Be The Batman

Warner Bros came to us with a simple but challenging proposition – broaden the reach of the Arkham Knight game beyond the hardcore fans of Batman and sell it to the casual gamer.

Borjomi International, headquartered in Kyiv, Ukraine, reached out to Battery, 6,294 miles away because they needed help to penetrate the U.S. market with their natural volcanic mineral water. After experiencing the bold, fizzy taste of Borjomi for the first time, and leaning into market research, we moved forward with the most polarizing insight &#8211; only 1 in 2 people actually like it. Then we created a campaign to challenge consumers to try it and expand their personal understanding of “natural.”
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Tastes Like Nature. You Just Forgot What Nature Tastes Like.

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Borjomi

In 2014, Jackbox Games released the Jackbox Party Pack, a collection of fun, quirky video games that friends and family can enjoy together. So when they came to us with the opportunity to launch the Jackbox Party Pack 7, we were all in. The games themselves put everyday people into absurd situations, which makes for the best kind of memories&#8230;weird ones.
With the use of Party Packs peaking around New Year’s eve, Jackbox Games releases a Party Pack every year kicking off the Thanksgiving season. We were challenged to create an evergreen (yet of the moment) campaign with enough versatility to transition into holiday mode.
As existing Jackbox fans, we knew we had to capture the insane, side-splitting spontaneity of the games without leaning on gameplay footage. We also knew that there had to be butt jokes,

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We all miss regularly seeing friends and family, but Zooms are exhausting. So how do we bring back the hangout and reclaim some of the spontaneity &amp; magic of being with your loved ones? By playing games and making weird memories together. 
Jackbox Party Packs boast a low tech barrier to entry and are easily adaptable for remote play. So why limit ourselves by treating it as a video game when it is the party? 
We teamed up with the demented comic geniuses of <a href="https://www.fatalfarm.com/">Fatal Farm</a> (Lasagna Cat, Alternate TV Intros) to capture Jackbox Party Pack 7’s chaotic, hilarious energy. Though to be honest, they were in it for the terrifyingly funny giant papier-mâché head.

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Let's Make Some Weird Memories

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Jackbox Games Party Pack 7

It’s been 20+ years since the Crash Bandicoot franchise came out with its original trilogy and fans were hungry for a completely new game. So when Activision announced they’re restarting the saga with an all-new installment, we knew we wanted to bring back the notorious humor, wit, and absurdity of the beloved ‘90s Crash, living in today’s world.

With his classic bullhorn in hand, the Bandicoot arrives just in time to crash a gender reveal party and sneaker release that captures the attention of long-time real Crash fan and rap music icon, Quavo. Did they just become best friends? Yup.

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Crash is back, just in time

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Activision’s Crash Bandicoot™ 4: It’s About Time

It’s been 20+ years since the Crash Bandicoot franchise came out with its original trilogy and fans were hungry for a completely new game.

<h2></h2>
It started in the off-season with the words of coach Doc Rivers, “It feels like we’re building a movement.” In a town that’s defined by glitz and glam, where Hollywood hype has long dominated the scene, the Clippers have risen above past adversity, and quietly changed the game with a gritty, and unrelenting style of basketball. On and off the court, the Clippers have built an organization that reflects the resilient spirit of the community it plays for. This is the real LA. This is LA Our Way.

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<h2></h2>
As the Clippers’ agency of record, we set out to galvanize fans and Angelenos around this cultural movement with a grassroots campaign that’s inspired by the hard-fought and harder-won progress LA creates every day. A rally cry for underdogs everywhere, LA Our Way celebrates the sense of civic pride, and pure love of basketball that drives Clipper Nation. And it’s working. After a matter of months, we drove awareness up 63% in LA.

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LA Clippers

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This is LA Our Way

A rally cry for underdogs everywhere, LA Our Way celebrates the sense of civic pride, and pure love of basketball that drives Clipper Nation. And it’s working. After a matter of months, we drove awareness up 63% in LA.

<h2>Netflix Originals</h2>
Known as a pioneer in original dramas like Stranger Things, The Crown, and Orange Is the New Black, Netflix saw an opportunity to bring its content cred to other bingeable programming blocks. Like standup comedy. 
That’s when Netflix approached Battery with what was known at the time as Project Unicorn. A dream brief to hijack culture and launch Netflix’s new standup specials with specials from comedy legends like Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres and Chris Rock.

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Our campaign launched with stark black and white billboards with four simple words: NETFLIX IS A JOKE. These boards were strategically placed near industry press and influencers in LA and New York. Media and social chatter began, speculating whether these boards were a prank or a competitor’s smear campaign. The millions of questions were answered on the Emmy Awards broadcast where a 60 second film revealed Netflix’s iconic dramas being invaded by these titans of comedy. What started with four words on a billboard almost four years ago continues to serve as a platform for all things comedy at Netflix today.

NETFLIX IS A JOKE was honored as Ad Age’s Campaign of the Year as well as winning at Cannes, D&amp;AD and picking up two Grand Clios.

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Netflix Is A Joke

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Netflix Flies Its Funny Flag

Our campaign launched with stark black and white billboards with four simple words: Netflix Is A Joke. These boards were strategically placed near industry press and influencers in LA and New York.

What do one of golf’s all-time greats and one of the world’s largest financial services companies share in common? They both find a competitive edge in spotting patterns that others miss.
Globally, RBC is one of the most trusted and respected capital markets leaders in the game, but its wealth-management business is still something of an unknown quantity here in the United States. To connect with affluent, high-achieving individuals in this market there’s no better stage than the PGA, and no player more relevant than Dustin.
The only problem is you can’t swing a seven-iron without hitting an established financial brand in this space. To stand out from the crowd, who all walk, talk, and look the same, we took an approach as unique as DJ’s swing. We put a cinematic spin on the typical golf ad by working with A-list talent behind the camera, heightening the tension through visual effects and sound design.

Dustin Johnson Sees Things Differently

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RBC Golf

CHALLENGE
How do you launch a new product into the crowded toys-to-life category dominated by the likes of Activision’s Skylanders and Disney’s Infinity? Not to mention a product with a higher price point against companies with a 3-year head start? You do it to the LEGO way – with Imagination.
HOW
What makes LEGO great? LEGO empowers builders of tomorrow making the next great generation of imagineers.  The competitive products simply gave kids non-posable figures to play with, whereas with LEGO Dimensions, kids could harness the full power of their imaginations and control their worlds via LEGO’s famous blocks. Thus, the idea was born…”You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Imagination.”

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CAMPAIGN
We developed the campaign proposition in a global launch campaign across experiential, TV and online challenging kids and adults alike to combine brain, brawn, and horsepower to achieve what no single hero, no matter how powerful, can achieve. Unlike Disney and Activision, we put the focus on the kids, not the product.
We empowered them to realize all of their imaginations, to build their worlds as they wanted, giving them ultimate control through their imagination. An imagination so big that not even their house could contain it. Thanks to our friends at Plastic Wax in Sydney for their masterful CG work in our launch spot.

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RESULTS
LEGO Dimensions went on to outsell the previous category leader Disney Infinity.
“FROM THE MOMENT WE FIRST HEARD BATTERY’S CAMPAIGN DIRECTION WE KNEW…”
“They had captured the endless possibilities of the brand in a way that speaks perfectly to our multiple targets. We were in!”
— Stephanie Johnson
VP Global Marketing, LEGO Franchise

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Lego Dimensions

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You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Imagination

What makes Lego great? Lego empowers builders of tomorrow making the next great generation of imaginers.

After the history-shattering legacy of the USWNT in 2019, women’s soccer has become an unstoppable force in culture. But Los Angeles, the global epicenter of entertainment and a city with two pro teams in every other major sport, still doesn’t have a professional women’s team. Until now.
This club was inspired by the idea that fans and players deserve better. Fans are hungry for a show that’s both sport and spectacle. Communities want to rep a religion they all believe in. The kid in us wants to see our heroes rise as superstars, and get paid like them too. And even those who aren’t soccer fans want to join the party.
So now, in this inevitable season of change, a group of athletes, local leaders, fans, and citizens are creating something undeniable and unignorable. A team that lives up to the name Angel City.

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ACvert

Created to elevate the business of women’s sports and entertainment, fight for equal pay, build more accessible and equitable fan communities, Angel City was built from the ground up as a global brand, not just a local team.
From the team name to the mission statement to the iconography, we worked closely with our partners at Angel City Football Club (yes we came up with the name!), to sell through an expansion team to the National Women’s Soccer League and build a diverse coalition of owners, supporters, and community micro-leaders.
For the club announcement, we developed a film that established the brand as a force bigger than soccer, and helped gain 465K Instagram followers, international media coverage, and praise from other athletes, and sports franchises.

Creating a Team That's Bigger Than a Game

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Angel City

In this inevitable season of change, a group of athletes, local leaders, fans, and citizens are creating something undeniable and unignorable. A team that lives up to the name Angel City.

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