World of Warships: Earn Your Greatness

Right on the heels of the Washington Capitals 2018 Stanley Cup championship, Wargaming, the developer behind the popular online game World of Warships, inked Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin to an endorsement deal.

The brand wanted to feature a new and unusual voice for the industry and sought to draw comparisons between achievement in athletics and achievement in the World of Warships through the common thread of practice and repetition.

We collaborated with Wargaming to help them realize maximum value from their endorsement dollars, creating a film that bridges the gap between a gaming spot and a high-end athletic brand anthem.

Playing World of Warships and professional hockey don’t have much in common on the surface, but the brand felt that the connection between the two was obvious: both were highly developed skills, and you could only achieve great things in each through rigorous practice, repetition, and learning through failure.

They tasked us with creating a centerpiece video that not only conveyed the emotional journey of this experience, but also combined the act of practicing these skills in a visually effective and intuitive way.

This inspired our creative direction for “Earn Your Greatness.” We wanted viewers to watch the video and feel a primal need to improve and challenge themselves to be better than they thought they could be.

We also saw a lot of fruitful similarities between naval combat and hockey that guided our approach. Both were conducted on water. Both involved the launching of projectile objects across a body of water, at unreasonably small targets. And both shared a similar blink-and-you’ll-miss-it intensity and pace.

As a result, we based our concept around moments where we could blur the boundaries between the worlds of hockey and Warships: pucks that become missiles, ice that transforms into the rocky sea, and direct hits on the net with direct hits on a target vessel.

We structured our spot around the emotional journey of someone who is giving their all to try and improve at something. First, there is the rush of initial success, the feeling of fresh legs. This gives way to hitting a wall, frustration, and failure; and only through resolve and focus can one break through and come out better than they used to be.

This video was lauded by PC Gamer as “amazing” and one of the most engaging celebrity endorsement videos in the industry. It led the way for promoting the fall 2018 update for World of Warships.

Artex was responsible for the conceptualization, scripting, treatment, production, and post-production for this project.

We were honored with an ADDY award from the American Advertising Federation for our accomplishments in this project in the field of Sound Design.