Inside Mars and Unilever’s campaigns to tap into gaming

The region has dominated the industry for years now, growing at an exponential rate and attracting higher demands for content including the metaverse, web3 and cloud gaming.

Ahead of The Drum Awards for Digital Advertising in APAC later this year, we’ve taken a closer look at the shortlist for the Best Use of Gaming category, which saw FMCG giants such as Unilever and Mars Wrigley enter.

5 Gum and Twitch

In Australia, Mars Wrigley’s 5 Gum brand was looking to reach 25-year-olds and under as they are the biggest chewers of gum. But the brand found that they are increasingly hard to reach through traditional media channels.

Armed with the insight that chewing gum helps people to focus, 5 Gum partnered with Twitch to help bring its ‘life happens in 5’ identity to life through gaming. Together they launched Team Clutch, an elite squad made up of Australia’s favorite Twitch streamers. The 26 hours of streams were full of moments as the campaign exceeded performance, topped the Australia charts of Most Viewed Stream, Highest Reach and Total Minutes Watched, and saw an uplift of 14% in gaming association and 9% in purchase intent.

Unilever, Closeup and Digital Turbine

Third-party cookies are on the way out, and to address this Unilever-owned Closeup – a leading toothpaste brand in the Philippines – was searching for a new way to gather fully-consented opted-in consumer information to develop its new customer retention and rewards program Ucoin.

Closeup also wanted to activate in the gaming space. With the rise of mobile gamers across the globe, the brand recognized the potential of gamification as a platform to engage and strengthen its connections with its consumers.

Closeup collaborated with Mobile Legends Bang Bang, whose reach of 23 million monthly active users in the Philippines was a cut above the rest. Powered by Digital Turbine ad technology, Closeup would collect user data from MLBB gamers and enroll them to Ucoin, where they would then be rewarded with in-game MLBB 10-diamond coupons they could immediately use.

With a Value Exchange strategy powered by a robust promotional plan, the Closeup DAD Collection campaign with Mobile Legends was hugely successful and broke new ground in data acquisition. The Closeup DAD Collection initiative provided a blueprint for data collection – a combination of the intuitive user journey, technology-driven data collection and a relevant reward for consented data opt-in – and is now a proven formula for success for Unilever brands.

Paddle Pop, Unilever and InMobi

During the pandemic, while most brands were struggling to maintain business, Paddle Pop grew while staying true to its brand value of promoting “wholesome and playful moments between parents and kids.”

During this time children had limited outdoor activities and classes to keep them occupied, meaning parents were struggling to find ways to build productive habits for their kids while trying to spend quality time with them.

Paddle Pop leveraged mobile in a creative way. A ‘game plan’ was charted to drive full-funnel efficiencies and significant impact across awareness, consideration and conversion stages. The brand highlighted a short video to grab users’ attention to the Choco Magma Land, a game that needed no downloads, to drive consideration. The game had three levels with exciting challenges, giving both parents and children an immersive and adventurous ice-cream-making gamified experience. Supporting consideration, Paddle Pop re-engaged users with rich media banners to drive conversions, and then went on to accurately measure the campaign performance with a brand lift study.

The campaign CTR was six times the industry benchmark and led to a massive lift in store visits – over 50% of the audience visited a store near their homes. The post-campaign brand lift study showed that 86% of respondents took positive action after watching it. Market penetration increased by 60+ basis points and market share increased by 50+ basis points for the brand.

For more information about the awards and how you can attend/watch the results, head over to the dedicated site.