BRAWL STARS GLOBAL LAUNCH
We worked with the wonderful Ryan Lighton at Supercell on Boom Beach, and when he moved across to oversee the beta launch of a new game, he immediately brought us on board to create content for its fledgling community.
After a year of crunching the numbers, social listening and making wholesale changes to the art style and even the orientation, Supercell decided to launch the game to a community highly suspicious they were in fact going to kill it.
Our goal: to drive millions of downloads.
Our strategy: to create a frenzy of speculation.
The following case study tells the story best.
The campaign was a huge success, garnering a Clio nomination, a BIMA win, Highly Commended in the Marketing Masters, and three Drum awards including the prestigious Chair's Award.
Ongoing retention
Post launch, we created a raft of social content to educate, inform and entertain the growing social community.
Weekly social listening identified memes, talking points and reaction to game updates, and we generated content as a consequence as part of our overall retention strategy - all of which can be seen on Brawl Stars' Instagram, Facebook and YouTube channels.
These three posts alone generated over 1 million views and 6,000 comments.
BRAWLIMATION
As well as regular static or lightly animated posts, our remit included more ambitious, large scale projects.
We knew our fan base were full of digital artists, and often shared their creations. We had an idea to harness this creativity with the first official fan-made Brawl Stars video.
We created a 320 frame by frame animation - and invited the community to 'colour it in' - picking a frame and submitting it, in four batches.
We used social channels for our call to action, driving participants to the Reddit community - the most engaged.The results astonished us with their quality - in all, we had over 700 submissions. We then stitched them together and played back the whole thing.
Brawlimation
Making of the Brawlimation
Animated emojis
Our relationship with the brilliant Brawl Stars game team meant that we were invited to create animated 'stickers' of the Brawlers, in the form of short .gifs.
Riffing on simple emotions like emojis, these could then be used in a variety of ways by Supercell or different agency partners across all social platforms, incorporated into different content.
Official Brawl Stars Animojis
As part of the launch, Supercell partnered with Apple to become the first brand to create bespoke 'animojis'.
These use the iPhone's in-built camera and face-tracking to allow people to record personalised messages to send to their friends - in this case, as Brawl Stars.
We created two videos to help drive awareness and build brand love for this exciting partnership.
Brawlified Influencers
At the Global Launch of Brawl Stars, Supercell flew 100 YouTube creators out to Helsinki so they could livestream the event, and amplify awareness via their own channels.
We flew out as partners to chronicle the two days on Instagram Live, where our countdown video was played as each time zone went global. At the event, I suggested we bring two illustrators with us to 'brawlify' the creators, in real-time. Who wouldn't want to see themselves as a Brawl Star?