Challenge
Raise awareness around the Stellaris winter sale discount and drive conversions!
In November, Paradox approached us to help them come up with new ways of promoting Stellaris, an eight year old grand strategy game set within a fantastical science fiction universe.
According to them, there was a need to refresh and rethink their approach to courting a new generation of players, both young and old, and they looked to us to provide a strategic creative media proposal that did just that.
Our Approach
Informed experimentation.
With a mandate to take risks and experiment, our media and creative teams set out to put together a media and content strategy that allowed us to authentically shift where and how we promoted Stellaris, pushing the boundaries of what a Stellaris advertisement looked and sounded like.
From a media perspective, our team advised to center our campaign focus on two platforms, Reddit and TikTok, to best utilise the tactical investment Paradox had for their global Winter Sale campaign. In terms of audience strategy, Reddit allowed us to target based on interests and topics relevant to the brand and game experience, such as politics and finance, whereas TikTok allowed us to reach and introduce Stellaris to a younger audience.
Our Execution
“Unusual and amazing”
Once our sights were set on our audiences, we came up with bespoke content executions to cater to each identified audience on each specific platform.
For TikTok, we took our experimentation one step further and built an interactive story ad that prompted users to make choices between in-game species based on cuteness and trustworthiness. Along with a clear CTA, we also leveraged licensed tracks instead of existing Stellaris music to switch up the vibe of the brand, which helped us position this 8 year old game in a fresh and novel way. Unfortunately, when the campaign went live, there were issues with TikTok’s ad platform that didn’t serve the desired ending users had selected, but nevertheless, we were able to set a record high VTR, the likes of which Paradox had never seen before.
For Reddit, we followed our audience media strategy and created dedicated video ads for our economics and politics focused targets, leveraging cleverly written copy and well edited cutdowns that gave a broad flavour of what users could expect when entering the Stellaris universe as the ruler of a star system where resources and diplomacy are essential.
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