A staged break-in at a cinema by a grop of gamers intent on playing their game on a huge movie-size screen was the launch of a promotional campaign for a new South America online games retailer Falabella Videogames.
With a brief to promote the launch of a new videogame online store, and a challenge to combat the fact that traditionally in Chilean gamers buy a lot of pirate games, agency Mayo Draft FCB came up with an innovative collaboration-led campaign.
Working in tandem with Chilean cinema chain CineMark, the idea behind the collaboration was based on a gaming experience that was better than anything achievable by pirating a game – playing on a big screen.
The starting point was to shoot and release a viral video of two gamers breaking in to a cinema at night to play their PS3 Call Of Duty game on its big screen.
To reflect the look and feel of the hacking, pirate community, this video was released as real on just one single post at 4.15am on one forum (GamerCL) on 8 December. The link to the video spread like wildfire and generated thousands of comments, tweets and sites (it reached YouTube’s top 5 chart and generated 833,000 plus views in just two days).
With the idea of playing on a cinema screen planted in the community’s mindset, the agency then launched a campaign which made this gamers dream of playing a game on a cinema screen come true – with the launch of the Cine-Gamers campaign.
This included a promotional ad, a website and a competition – the prize was to play videogames in CineMark cinemas up and down the country with your friends. It was pushed via Adsense, social ads and at the brand’s Facebook fan page – which currently boasts 100,000 fans.
Comment:
Not traditional sponsorship, but a good example of media collaboration: a classic example of a partnership campaign that combines the strengths and advantages of two media – gaming and cinema. The gaming company promoted its stock, while the cinema chain pushed its brand and brought a new audience (gamers|) through its doors).
This strategy also saw a campaign create its own demand – create a dream and then baring it to reality.
The results, well, within one month the new online retailer’s entire game stock was sold.
Links:
www.falabellagamers.com/cinegamers
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.