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The Drum Awards Brand Strategy Awards Case Studies

Here's how ViewSonic united players to tackle negative gamer stereotypes

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By Awards Analyst, writer

December 7, 2022 | 6 min read

ViewSonic won Best Branding Campaign at The Drum Awards for Digital Advertising APAC and Most Effective Digital Media Strategy at The Drum Awards for Digital Industries 2022. Here's what went into this successful work.

united by play

ViewSonic encouraged player to express why they game

Through the process of launching its Elite line of pro-grade gaming monitors in 2019, ViewSonic discovered that the majority of game-playing individuals did not actually identify themselves as ‘gamers’; less than a third resembled the stereotypical image associated with gamers in modern media. To address this discrepancy, the brand released the Omni range, bringing both product lines under the overall umbrella of ‘ViewSonic Gaming’.

The brief

The objective of the United by Play (UBP) campaign was to generate awareness and bolster consideration for ViewSonic Gaming by celebrating the diverse spectrum of players and acknowledging their equally diverse motivations for playing. By championing this representation, ViewSonic wanted to push back against negative gamer stereotypes and encourage players to openly embrace gaming.

The Idea

ViewSonic put the slogan “No matter why you game, we’re all United by Play” at the core of all UBP activations. It started by creating a global website to act as the flag-bearing home of the UBP message, while also serving as the central landing page for most subsequent activity.

The company’s gaming social arm got to work producing engaging content and leveraged paid media to cultivate a global audience of like-minded people to stand behind UBP’s values. Working with the independent production company ‘Two Kids with a Camera’, it produced an original docuseries showcasing gamers around the world that take things into their own hands to go ‘Beyond the Game’, as well as United by Play’s hero video. The latter was designed to be a montage of colorful personas depicting people of varying age, gender, ethnicity, and occupation, with each giving a statement on ‘why’ they game.

Paid ads focused on pushing the hero video and docuseries via multiple channels for ViewSonic’s key growth markets across Europe and Asia. Rather than blindly focusing on pure reach/impressions, ViewSonic staked success on completion rates and cost-efficient CPCVs in order to verify people’s engagement and consideration in light of a tempting option to skip each ad.

With one final social push, United by Play Awards would then wrap everything up by spurring mass community engagement: asking fans to submit user-generated content showcasing ‘why [they] game’, while giving them a chance to win prizes from our Elite and Omni series.

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The results

In less than a month, programmatic video ads reached 900,000 unique individuals in over 875,000 households, for a total of 2.1 million impressions. To ensure that the message was taken in by viewers, ViewSonic optimized the completion rate to a final overall value of 79% (16% better than its benchmark of 67%).

Social accounts successfully engaged in sparking conversation among the global gaming community, reaching over 24.1m unique users across Facebook and Instagram, cumulatively receiving over 507K post engagements, nearly 130K link clicks, and almost 2.1m thru plays across all video posts.

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