How Waste Creative and Supercell spread Brawl Stars to the world overnight

Supercell won the “Chair Award” at Drum Content Award 2019, Brawl Stars Global Launch campaign by Waste Creative.

Here we identify the challenges facing agencies and the strategies used to deliver this successful campaign.

Press the button on the player

When Supercell decided to launch the maniac multiplayer battle Brawl Stars, they ignited the beta player GenZ community in a full-blown online noise frenzy and a media campaign that changed the minds of mobile gamers everywhere. I needed a global campaign that needed.

After months of social listening, Waste Creative knew that the Brawl Stars beta community had tightly protected the game and was afraid to lose it. “So we subtly hinted that it might disappear, and saw fireworks,” says Christian Perins, chief strategy officer at Waste Creative.

“We felt that the players deserved to be rewarded for the inspiring roller coaster we carried, so after revealing it, we made a big effort to have fun festive content and a good time.”

The Waste Creative campaign boosted 5 million pre-registration applications in eight hours, dramatically growing the game’s social channels from 188% on Instagram to 194% on YouTube, and ultimately in 32 countries. I expect it to be the No. 1 iPhone app for. Over $ 10 million in the first week.

Fear of loss

The agency has been fully deployed as it has been involved with Brollstars since the first day of beta launch 18 months ago. We used a combination of social listening and data analytics to build a comprehensive player-based understanding. What made them tick (and kicks, punches, and fires).

A long-standing partnership with Supercell and a year-long evolutionary journey from alpha, beta to pre-leg and global expansion have helped to gain a thorough understanding of players and the community, said Business Director Harry Fairfax Jones. say. Useless creative. “It meant that we could run it with a very successful game launch, coupled with a great client who is willing to take risks.”

Using these important insights, Waste Creative has devised a seemingly simple strategy that combines Supercell’s reputation for bumper-off games (they killed dozens of people) with the player’s desire to globalize. ..

As social media is “reset” (deleted), the agency teased existing players with an ambiguous final post. Was the game trying to say goodbye or was it a new dawn?

With no single still image, descriptive copy, or paid media, Waste Creative generated millions of organic impressions with an engagement rate of 26%.

No one was sure what was going on, but everyone was talking. Community speculation flooded in with tens of thousands of social posts, memes, conspiracy theoretic videos, songs, online petitions, and trend hashtags. #dontkillbrawlstars.

Everything was revealed on YouTube Live Stream: Global! The follow-up sunrise image confirming the start of the game gained even higher reach and engagement (27%).

Community unity

As the fast-growing global community awaits the official release of the game, agencies needed to foster goodwill between millions of new sign-ups and OBs (former Brawlers) during the beta test period.

Next month, Waste will create a raft of content to facilitate pre-registration, thank OBs for their support, introduce and educate new players to the game, compare sign-ups in different regions, and be competitive. Engagement of their peers as much as possible in a community.

Supercell’s goal of enrolling 2 million people during the 4-week pre-registration period reached 5 million in the first 8 hours, and has surged from there.

Launch in style

At the official launch event in Helsinki, Waste attended with 100 content creators to amplify and celebrate the long-awaited day. They “brawled” influencers – literally turning them into bespoke brawl star characters and gaining thousands of shares and engagement from their audience.

The agency also recorded the day, filmed and edited Instagram Stories footage, encouraged Instagram followers, who have surged to one in three of 240,000, to ask questions during a live AMA session, and a launch button for the game. Was pushed by its most immobile player.

Ryan Ryton, Community Manager at Supercell, said: “Waste has been a valuable strategic, creative and productive partner since the founding of Brollstars.

“Their nonsense approach to content creation and the essential knowledge of the game was essential to Brollstar’s journey, from before we went into beta to its global launch. Waste is all of us. It was there at the stage. “

In the first week, Brawl Stars earned over $ 10 million and was the number one iPhone app in 32 countries.

This project won the Drum Content Awards 2019. click here Register your interest in the 2020 Awards.