A Marketing Campaign Cultural Zeitgeist
So let's set the stage - you work on a free-to-play video game that primarily monetizes through in game cosmetics (aka 'skins') for the many hundreds of champions that players can choose from. Ok cool, so now we have a few new skins coming out, how should we market them? What if we took characters from our video game and created a virtual K-pop group? And what if that K-pop group became an award winning global phenomenon that outperformed the most popular K-pop groups in the world? Well… that’s exactly what we did. Please enjoy the official K/DA MORE music video.
100M+ views, industry awards, and a few unforgettable reactions later, guess we nailed it. Wait, what's that? Oh you want to also launch a new champion too? Yeah I guess we can do some type of standard gameplay trailer right? Nah... let's try something else. What if we create a virtual social influencer / artist that built an organic fanbase through releasing her own music and covers? And then what if that artist gets 'discovered' and then featured by K/DA? Meanwhile, all these organic fans and followers had no idea it was the new champion all along? Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. Let's do that!
Why Meet Expectations When You Can Crush Them?
Riot Games is a cool company and at the time of writing this, it has a pretty solid reputation with most people. The quality bar is set really high, so people have high expectations. But we didn't want to just meet the high expectations. We wanted to crush them. A worldwide trending music video is cool, but we didn't stop there. We dropped an entire EP.
AN EP... FOR A VIDEO GAME...