Challenge
Promote the arrival of Season 22’s new features and drive consideration amongst a wider, mainstream audience beyond the core.
In response to player feedback that Apex Legends was too difficult to play, Season 22 brought with it a host of amazing new features that were designed to make the game more accessible. New quality of life features, such as improved waypoint marking, hit markers and a bot playground for players to practice their moves and tactics, were a huge improvement. However, the crown jewel of this season was a feature many players had longed for: the ability to respawn automatically within a BR gaming session.
And, with an ambition to generate wider awareness amongst a long lapsed and new FPS audience, we had our work cut out for us.
Our Approach
Leverage data and insights to find interest overlaps to inform our creative approach.
Although we knew that the Respawn team would be running their classic paid media and organic awareness campaigns across the globe, we had to complement those awareness efforts with our brand awareness activations in the UK.
Before going into conception and production, we studied all the research material available to find insights that could resonate with a wider FPS audience. What we found was that mainstream players who played FPS games in the UK had a strong affinity towards football, more specifically the Premier League. This insight, when put through the prism of Season 22’s features, specifically the respawn feature, showed us that there was something interesting and aspirational we could lean into.
What do professional footballers have in common with players who jump into Apex Legends Season 22? The choice to get back up after getting knocked down.
Our Execution
Authentic and fun video content that tastefully highlights the parallels between life, football and Apex Legends.
Armed with our insights and creative knowhow, we set out to find the right cast for this content piece. First, we had to secure our football talent. Along with playing in the Premier League, we wanted to find players whose careers had shown that they had the experience necessary to talk about ‘respawning’ after getting knocked down.
Partnering up with Wasserman, we were able to secure two Premier League stalwarts: Jordan Pickford (fresh from his Euro 2024 exploits) and Tyrone Mings. Next, we needed to find a suitable interviewer. One with massive reach and football and gaming relevance for our target audience, but also whose content style is known for being fun and light-hearted. When Wasserman presented us with Jeremy Lynch, we knew we’d found our host.
With talent locked, we proceeded to shoot our content, accompanied by a AAA shooting team who helped us capture and curate an authentic and fun interview with our hand picked talent.
We seeded our content over the course of 2 weeks, leading first with our hero piece and leveraging both organic and paid social media to drive awareness of full length video on YouTube. Globally, across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, we managed to achieve over 4 million content views!