Attracting today’s new gamer

(marketingmagazine.com.my) – By: Malati Siniah

When Entropia received the brief from its client Etika to create a campaign surrounding its annual Dew Challenge for Mountain Dew the agency looked at it as a challenge to engage a new fan base for the brand.

Speaking to MARKETING, Ramakrishnan CN, Partner at Entropia, shared,

“While the Dew Challenge promotes its Dota tournament, we saw that it mainly targets a smaller group of hard core gamers. We saw bigger opportunity for the brand to reach out to an untapped market, the casual gamers”

In its effort to bridge the divide between the casual and hard core gamer this year the agency brought to life the “Dew Challenge Drone Hunt” in addition to its existing Dota tournament.

The new mixed reality campaign takes a cue from Mountain Dew’s positioning of ‘it doesn’t exist until you do it’ and the current global campaign “Drone Hunting now exists”.

Drone Hunt is an exciting mobile game that combines multiplayer dynamics, virtual reality, mental and physical challenges to hunt for virtual drones in real locations.

When the game first launched a 360 Facebook post was created to generate buzz on the challenge. The post created by the agency has so far received over 1000 shares

During the on-going regional rounds, players must capture as many virtual Mountain Dew drones and battle against each other to earn the highest points. Only the top ten participants from each of the five regions will proceed to the grand finale. The regions are Penang, Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, Kuantan and Johor.

Last weekend the brand concluded its third regional challenge in KL which saw participants working hard to secure a spot in the finals which will be held in early December.

The mobile game is activated in a ‘geo-fenced’ location, and at every regional round the participants embark on an immersive drone hunting journey – battling with each other in a game of speed, strategy and wits.

A special virtual ‘Voltage’ stations, based on the new Mountain Dew variant, are located within the play area – so the gamers can take a break, charge their phones and get immunity from battles.

“At Entropia, we aim to bring new-age designs for our clients by putting custom experiences at the heart of the campaign and coupled with adaptive distribution that blurs the advertising lines. Dew Challenge has been extremely successful in the past few years and we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level this year.” he shared.

Among the breakthrough initiative was to bring alive the drone hunt in newspapers. For the first time in Malaysia, a UV invisible ink based special ad was created to entice consumers. The idea was to encourage engagement among readers to find hidden drones embedded within the print ad – using a custom designed UV torch light that was included in the newspaper.

The heart of Entropia’s innovation lies in its people. Rama added how the campaign was brought to life thanks to weeks of brainstorming and collaboration between departments.

“We are currently growing our team and when hiring there are five key attributes- curious, agile, playful, relentless & inventive, we lookout for during an interview. Those who fit the bill can apply here” added Rama.

Santharuban, Group Marketing Manager of Etika, added, “Mountain Dew has been organising the Dew challenge and this marks the 5th year of the campaign. The campaign has so far given us great traction in which all the spots for the games and the tournament were snapped up very quickly.”

“The synergy between the team at Etika with our colleagues at PEPSICO as well as the new age campaign ideas from Entropia has helped us bring this campaign to life,” he added.