SUPERCELL
Global acquisition, retention and engagement
I spent three and a half years working on global acquisition, retention and engagement across all of Supercell's games, with the Marketing team in San Francisco and the Community teams in Helsinki.
As a retained agency, Waste needs to generate a huge volume of static and animated content every month to educate and entertain each game's highly active worldwide fan base. We fused social listening with specific mini briefs announcing dev updates, new features, characters, modes or skins, and a mix of relevant pop culture moments or memes.
The output is a fusion of strategic insight, creative ideas, art direction and often 2D or 3D motion in a variety of styles, which resulted in regularly outstanding engagement rates as players, fans and other creators liked, commented and shared in huge numbers.
BOOM BEACH
The Return of the MegaCrab
The Mega Crab is the maniacal creation of Dr T, the chief villain in Boom Beach. Taking it on is a monthly challenge for the players. Our job was to breathe new life into this event, excite community and make them feel Supercell still cared about one of its older titles.
The first in a series that ran for over ten months, this video was a labour of love for our Alex, our motion director, and Benny, our ACD. An amazing fusion of analogue and digital, merging 3D rendering with stop-motion animation in a stylised 1940s war propaganda style.
Anniversary Crab
HAY DAY
Meet the Farmer
I love this live action content series made in partnership with Peking (directing duo Nat Livingston Johnson and Gregory Mitnick), introducing Hay Day's players ('farmers') to some of the characters in its global community.
Coming in at Season 2, we auditioned and cast 8 players from around the world - ranging from the Norway to Laos - and captured the emotive, human stories of a range of diverse people, and how this gentle, affable mobile game weaves into their lives. They're beautifully shot and edited, and have been a real success.
Moosflash
I also really like this content series which played back recent social activity around the game from its beloved fans.
The idea was to give a voice to some of Hay Day's more peripheral characters (Rose and Ernest) - a genial couple of old-timers. We imagined the inside of their farmhouse, and brought it to life with illustration and some simple animation.
After regular social listening, our lead copywriter, Chloe Bishop wrote scripts which we cast and recorded, while the design team created assets to sit on our 50s retro style fridge. Each video takes the form of Ernest's exploration of the fridge, with asides and explanation from Rose.
CLASH OF CLANS
The Clash Chronicle
Similar to Moosflash and News from the Front for Hay Day and Boom Beach, we created a content template in order to produce a regular video series, the purpose of which was to capture the reactions of Clash of Clans' hugely engaged player base to recent updates, and showcase other content creators.
The Clash Chronicle is a far richer refresh of Village News, our first pass (a scroll read out by the town crier). This time, we devised a local newspaper, giving us the creative freedom of things like horoscopes, puzzles and local listings to play with.
The strategy and creative teams worked closely together using regular social listening, but this was a labour of love for Fraser Nicholas, lead creative on Clash of Clans, and Tasmin Lobley, Art Director. Fraser wrote every word in the chronicle - to the point where we explored making a physical version to give out as prizes.
Party Wizard
We shot a teaser video and a full game dev update with our Supercell Community Manager, the wonderful Darian, and Supercell Creator Judo Sloth. It was filmed in the Ministry of Sound by Villager, who did a great job and an amazing turnaround. Creatives were Fraser Nicholas and Andrew Bentham.
The Night Before Clashmas
As part of our ongoing work with Supercell and Clash of Clans, we created an engaging piece of seasonal content to reward its legions of fans, using stylised illustrations and backgrounds combined with 3D. Written by Fraser Nicholas, Art Directed by Sam Whiffing and brought to life by the brilliant Waste motion team.
Barbarian Takeover
An Instagram takever by the iconic Clash of Clans Barbarian to drive organic engagement for the game's 5.3m followers. It featured static posts, polls, carousels, videos and Instagram Live posts.
We plotted a week’s worth of in-feed posts that mixed illustration with frame-by-frame animation, and riffed on popular culture and social memes (male grooming, #ThursdayThought etc). Viewers were invited to tag friends, rate facial hair and spot hidden details.
Illustration was in-house by the brilliant Patrick Warren, Berat Pekmezci, and Naoimi Seah. Creative by the inimitable Fraser Nicholas, with art direction by Tasmin Lobley. Andrew Bentham marshalled the whole thing to the finish line. We saw a strong uplift in channel followers, with consistently high organic engagement and positive sentiment throughout.
