With a little bit of misdirection, this game developer created hype for its 10-year-old game. Find out how!
I personally like guerrilla marketing because it never fails to amaze me in showing that any marketer can capture the hearts and minds of his or her audience with a dash of creativity and unconventional thinking. Today, allow us to share yet another outstanding guerrilla marketing campaign. Continue reading to learn how a game developer celebrated the 10th anniversary of its critically acclaimed video game!
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With a little bit of misdirection, this game developer created hype for its 10-year-old game. Find out how! In 2022, “Clash of Clans,” a popular mobile video game, reached its 10-year anniversary. With a player base of over 70 million, Supercell, the developer behind the critically acclaimed free-to-play mobile game, had to come up with a way to celebrate the milestone. Celebrating “Clash of Clans’” 10th anniversary was no easy feat since traditional ads and campaigns wouldn’t be enough to capture the attention of gamers who played or knew about the game. With this challenge in mind, Supercell and its ad agency partner Wieden + Kennedy Portland came up with a campaign that celebrated the anniversary. This wasn’t just a typical campaign because it involved the use of… … Fake news! Yes, you read that right. While fake news is typically associated with false or misleading information, it was the medium that Supercell and Wieden + Kennedy Portland chose to generate hype for “Clash of Clans’” 10-year anniversary. Why? The game developer wanted to pull fans into an alternate universe where “Clash of Clans” had existed since 1982. Supercell and Wieden + Kennedy Portland didn’t want their vision to be viewed as a joke since they wanted to make fans of the game feel that “Clash of Clans” was just as important as other iconic gaming franchises that had shaped their lives. So, to make this alternate view of history possible, the game developer and the ad agency created a guerrilla marketing campaign where they led their audience to think that “Clash of Clans” had been in existence for 40 years. The guerrilla marketing campaign named, “Clash from the Past” played out like this:
Supercell and Wieden + Kennedy Portland played a game with their fans and took them down a nostalgia rabbit hole of fake news that made audiences believe that “Clash of Clans” have existed since 1982. In line with this goal, the gaming developer and its partner ad agency scripted and story-boarded 40 years of history and created 3 fake founders who were portrayed in a story of fame, fortune, and calamity.
This eventually led to the creation of an incredibly detailed documentary series that was shot on 5 different era-specific cameras. Subsequently, fake products, fake interviews, and scenes from a fake movie were created and advertised to “legitimize” the campaign. Meanwhile, an Ask Me Anything (AMA) post was staged on Reddit with one of the fake founders from the documentary series. The social media pages of Supercell also released fake commercials that took audiences on trips down memory lane. Supercell took it a step further by having its teams create era-specific minigames such as an 80s arcade platformer, a 90s racer, and 2000s open-world role playing game (RPG). Those who were able to watch the documentary and play the minigames reacted positively to Supercell’s efforts. Was the Clash from the Past campaign effective? Supercell and Wieden + Kennedy generated over 65 million views on YouTube for its fake documentary. Moreover, the AMA session with one of the fake founders garnered the most upvotes on “Clash of Clans’” Reddit page. Additionally, the guerrilla marketing campaign bagged the following awards:
Kudos to Supercell and Wieden + Kennedy! These results and awards clearly highlight the effectiveness of the “Clash from the Past” campaign! — Today’s audiences are bombarded with eye-catching ads and campaigns each day, making it difficult for brands to capture their target market’s attention effectively. Supercell and Wieden + Kennedy understood this well. That’s why they spiced up their campaign with a dash of creativity and misdirection. By creating a fictional story that almost seemed real, the game developer was able to generate hype for “Clash of Clans” during its 10-year anniversary. The success of this campaign shows that if you want to engage your target audience in a meaningful and memorable way, sometimes you have to weave a creatively-crafted tale to capture their attention. Keep this insight in mind when you plan for your next guerrilla marketing campaigns! Hope you’ve found this week’s guerrilla marketing insight interesting and helpful. Do you want to know how this global fast food chain “newsjacked” its patrons for a day? See it in next week’s article! |
