THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 9th Annual Shorty Awards

Sonic Mania Infomercial

Entered in Short Form Video, Video

Objectives

Generate awareness, buzz, and get people just plain jazzed for the Collector's Edition of SEGA's new 2D adventure: Sonic Mania.

Strategy and Execution

Sonic Mania is a brand new, 16-bit, 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game created by SEGA. To promote the newly announced Collector's Edition version of the game, we created a parody commercial of an old Sonic 2 commercial that parodied infomercials.

In other words: a parody of a parody of a parody.

Since the game takes Sonic back to his 2D roots in the 90s, our strategy was to pay homage to the nostalgia of 90s SEGA advertising by creating a spot in wild 90's fashion.

To do this, we took a classic, famous commercial for Sonic 2 (see attached link for reference) and rewrote it to fit for Sonic Mania. The video was shot to look, sound, and feel like Sonic's advertising in 'the glory days' and even features Kazuyuki Hoshino, who was one of the original artists for 2D classic Sonic games. We remade many scenes from the original commercial shot-for-shot and combined them with new ones to represent the new game.

After putting the video up on Sonic's social media channels, the response was immediate and explosively positive. The rest was history--and fans couldn't have been more delighted.

Results

This video spot was a huge success and was organically featured in Forbes, Geek.com, US Gamer, Unilad, Engadget, Destructoid, Gamespot, Gamenesia, The Verge, VentureBeat, Techno Buffalo and more.

Stats:

Facebook:

- 3.7 Million Reach

- 585k Views

- 9.5k Shares

- 14k Reactions

- 1.4k Comments

Twitter:

- 7.2k RTs

- 13K Likes

YouTube

- 198k Views

All with 0 paid media.

Comments from fans on the spot:

- "This is the greatest video you guys have made yet. I already loved the original commercial. Sega, you guys rock. You really really do." – Jake Wetterlin

- "You guys are hilarious! Lol! Awesome commercial! I just prey ordered my collectors edition today" - Marlon Uchiha

- "This is the best thing ever. This alone makes me want to buy the collectors edition. Great job Sega, you finally know how to do Sonic properly. I'm excited." – Nathan Wright

Media

Video for Sonic Mania Infomercial

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Ayzenberg, SEGA of America

Links

Entry Credits