Image of Matt Bretz
Jury

Matt Bretz
Vice President - Creative Director
Ayzenberg

PASADENA, USA // If it’s a picture … and it moves … I’m one of four partners at Ayzenberg who helm a team of more than forty craftspeople working together to create it. From assets made of game capture to CG to live action to everything in between – my expertise is marrying form and function to make advertising that sells by entertaining. Rising up as a writer to creative direction, I’m now equally at home as a visual tastemaker. And since the modern marketing landscape is a fairly seamless mix of video within digital experiences … married together by visual ID … while percolating upward into social media conversations, influencer content and the “real” world – I oversee the making of stuff in all of these channels at Ayzenberg.

I started out marketing movies at the Cimarron Group. So I was there when game publishers came knocking on the door looking for help selling their games not as boxes on a shelf, but as experiences like movies. And whereas a lot of the folks who had made their careers in movie trailers were busy doing just that, I saw making game trailers as an exciting opportunity to pioneer new technology and tell great stories. Early on at Cimarron, my team launched World of Warcraft in China. Later at Ant Farm, we won the Game Marketing Awards trailer of the year for Fallout 3. And at Ayzenberg we’ve garnered a Clio for Halo’s Hunt the Truth, a Key Art for our Sunset Overdrive interactive trailer and numerous GMA’s, Key Arts and Effies for everything from our Xbox Characters That Matter visual ID to Twitter takeovers for Sonic the Hedgehog.

It’s a great honor to sit on the 2017 Clio Entertainment Games Jury. I still see some of the most leading edge work in advertising happening in this space. And being given the chance to help celebrate the work of my many extraordinary peers is quite thrilling.