Spiderman Shattered by Soap

MediaMind is pleased to share an interview with Matt “Griz” Griswold from Soap Creative in LA as part of our Favorite Brand Experiences series.

Your idea about a perfect working day?
California skies, a good breeze and a sailboat full of Diet Coke. For the other 364 days of the year, I’m more than happy with the chaos and fun of leading an agency doing great work for happy and stimulating clients.

Your muse best comes when:
My muse is a quiet night (around 3am) engaged in a heated multiplayer deathmatch with co-founder and idea factory Ashley Ringrose — the muse is stronger if I’m winning, of course. Some great ideas have come about while awaiting a respawn.

What was the brief for the Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions campaign?
Like all the best briefs: “Do something awesome and make us look good.” That’s not too hard with an icon like Spider-Man, a trusting client that gets just as excited as we do, and a team of super creative fanboys.

How did you come up with the idea for the campaign?
We broke off into teams of two and hooked into our patent-pending Brain Storm Isolator – it’s usually just a few hours before the ideas flow.

It also helps to have an office full of inspiringly creative gamers and fanboys – so we essentially got to center in on what we found cool and compelling. Ten minutes playing Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions easily beats two hours in the Brain Storm Isolator: the core fun is in the opportunity to take control over four distinct Spider-Man characters across four equally unique worlds, so we rallied behind that and worked closely with the MediaMind team to make it happen.

What feedback/results have you received?
The client is happy, the team behind it is happy, and the media agency is happy. The takeover units proved to be very effective and the game launched to success, thus increasing happiness all around to unprecedented levels of self-congratulatory backslapping. After about twenty minutes we went back to work — optimizing and taking notes for the web-slinger’s next adventure.

How did you start working in digital advertising?
I determined something could be done before getting lost in how it would be, and worked hard to fill in the details along the way until it was right. That was really the start of it, which led to another small opportunity… a fateful series of encounters [insert 80s-style montage sequence] led me into entertainment marketing and eventually to Soap (after working with them for several years as a client, I couldn’t resist). I was “the young, digital guy” who thought most anything was possible — now, at Soap, I’m “the somewhat older guy” (gray hairs be damned!) who thinks pretty much the same.