The challenge
Changing perceptions
If you go into an arcade to play one of your favourite games, you will most likely find an ICE (Innovative Concepts in Entertainment) model there. But what many games fans don’t know is that ICE produces arcade-quality games for the US home market too, so you can have the same experience in your living room.
ICE wanted to get the word out there and improve the outreach and engagement rate for its subsidiary Home Arcade Games brand. We entered a discovery phase with them. We conducted surveys, carried out audience profiling, and audited current marketing activities.
From our research, we identified that there were four target audiences that were most likely to convert into customers. However, we established that there was a general lack of brand awareness, and previous campaign messaging targeted a broad audience in the US rather than any specific segments. In addition, the customer surveys told us that a perception change was needed, with some customers not understanding the higher price point in comparison to competitors.
Our creative process
A targeted ad campaign
By gathering this insight, we were able to provide guidance on what steps should be taken to reach their goals. We knew that we needed to establish trust with the audience and promote the quality of the products, which are handmade in the US – a USP that competitors couldn’t match.
The messaging should target the people who were more likely to convert, whether that was a click, a view or a purchase and tap into new people who may not know of the Home Arcade Games brand.
We crafted messaging frameworks tailored for each audience that spoke to the desires of that segment. This was supported with an overarching tagline: “The real deal” that lets audiences know that what you’re getting with ICE is the real thing. Built to last, handmade in the US, and just like what you would get in a real arcade.
And then we were ready to put the strategy and insight into practice. We created a video ad campaign for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales period, with a different ad for each of the four audiences that could be scheduled across several Meta ad sets.
Each of the ads were filmed on location, guided by detailed hand-drawn storyboards. Because the ads were to be used as paid content and needed to capture the attention of scrollers, we created videos with visually driven stories that would make sense with no sound. Once the editing and finishing was complete, the ads entered a testing phase to monitor performance and then adjustments were made based on audience performance rates.
The result
Raising awareness and building trust
The ads yielded 874,106 impressions and 19,510 visits to the webpage in just under four weeks, which meant that new audiences were discovering Home Arcade Games. As more and more content is pushed out to these new audiences and brand awareness grows, they will hopefully see a surge of discovery, and purchases in the future.
