Challenge

For their upcoming release of Dune: Awakening, Funcom wanted to launch an awareness campaign in the US and in major European markets to promote the open world survival MMO immediately after its live announcement at gamescom, a leading trade fair for video games. They needed to engage with gamers who would want to watch the 2-minute CGI trailer, which far exceeded the ideal ad length format, in the first stage of the campaign and then continue to capture consumer attention with short-form creatives but running in December, the most competitive month of the year.

Solution

Partnering with Quantcast, Funcom’s agency attract mode picked channels with huge video reach potential that scale quickly. In parallel, they placed a Quantcast pixel on the unpublished Dune: Awakening website to be able to capture data points on the earliest conversions. To drive video views by relevant consumers, they capitalized on the conversations and intent happening after the announcement to connect with Funcom’s ideal gamer across channels. For each geographic region, Quantcast built a custom interest-based audience, skewing overall toward a young male demographic but with different levels of affluence depending on the region, then added premium gaming sites to broaden reach in the campaign’s second phase.

Results

Successfully connecting with consumers most likely to be interested in Dune: Awakening, the campaign outperformed attract mode’s initial projections significantly with:

• 2.5x more video views than goal
• 10% lower CPV and higher view rate than agency benchmarks for MMO games, even with the long-format video creative

The campaign’s second phase also exceeded expectations with 57% more video views than goal, beating the industry benchmarks for CPV as well.