Tribeca Film Festival and Beyond
Beyond: Two Souls was an unique new IP which I launched in 2013 - a heavily story-driven game headlined by performances from Hollywood talent like Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. It truly was unlike anything the gaming world had seen before, in both good ways and bad. We set out to de-position ourselves from "games" in order to manage expectations around gameplay, and push a positioning centered around Beyond as an unprecedented cinematic "emotional experience". Our release window in Fall of 2013 was crowded with some of the biggest name (and biggest budget) franchises in the world, so we had to really push the envelope in differentiating ourselves and reaching gamers in unexpected places in order to stand out with our far smaller budget. We eschewed a lot of conventional game marketing knowledge to do so - we went bigger earlier in order to build buzz in advance of a competitive release window, we branded and messaged ourselves like a movie with little focus on gameplay, and we focused more on non-gaming events/media like Tribeca Film Festival. The result was one of the most pre-ordered games of 2013, and launch day awareness/purchase intent measuring significantly above our campaign goals.
Goals
- Reinforce positioning as the closest thing to playing an Academy Award-winning thriller.
- Generate halo effect via co-branding with Tribeca Film Festival to enhance credibility of storytelling.
- Drive high baseline pre-order, awareness, & purchase intent targets - building momentum during inexpensive summer timeframe, allowing for lesser spend to sustain launch momentum during more crowded launch window.
Paying off the most emotional, cinematic experience on PlayStation
Everything we did in marketing Beyond drew influence from film, starting with the branding. The logo we created was big, bold, and inspired by blockbuster sci-fi logos. All of our key art and packaging put Ellen and Willem's names and characters front and center, leaning on their star power to tell the story, with just the right balance of paranormal intrigue for the consumer segment we were targeting. Aside from a few assets targeted towards more traditional gaming events, we largely avoided leveraging some of the more action-packed parts of the game, instead focusing our visuals on the more emotional and mysterious points in the story - something which really helped us stand out.
Partnering with Tribeca Film Festival helped us leverage their brand (as one of the most respected film festivals in the world) to build credibility for the artistic taste and storytelling skill conveyed in Beyond. It was probably the single-most impactful tactic we used in our campaign in convincing the world that this was a story to pay attention to. A big part of that was the trailer we created for the Tribeca event - tender, mysterious, heartbreaking - it made Beyond feel like a game right at home alongside the award-winning films screened at Tribeca. This trailer is, in my humble opinion, one of the best game trailers created in recent memory - and there's even a couple better versions we couldn't use for licensing reasons. It's received 2M organic views, with some viewers even coming to tears.
The event
After weeks of pre-promotion across the PlayStation blog, press outreach, social media, and email, we screened 35 minutes of the game before a sold-out live audience of over 500 attendees, including 70 global media members from lifestyle, entertainment, and enthusiast press outlets. This was the first time a game had ever been selected as an official partner of Tribeca Film Festival and screened in this way, and while many reporters wondered ahead of time "what the heck a video game trailer was doing at Tribeca Film Festival", by the time it was over the general sentiment was that the "stunning footage show[ed] why Beyond: Two Souls belonged at Tribeca". We got a standing ovation... Just saying. Following the event, Beyond's creator and stars participated in a panel discussion about the making of Beyond and what goes into creating an emotional journey like this. We live-streamed the whole event via UStream, with over 3.5 million unique viewers tuning in. The weeks following the event saw a 6800% increase in our Amazon product page visits, and our Nielsen metrics went crazy. It was a rousing success, and one which paid dividends throughout the rest of our campaign.
Notable promotion
Any campaign like this obviously has a ton of touchpoints - social, email, blogging, teaser videos, press outreach... It'll just bore you going into all the detail. However, there were a couple notable elements beyond the basics here.
First, it's pretty uncommon with games to actually involve retail in activations this early on in your campaign. Mostly, that's because it's expensive. However, I knew this event was going to drive a lot of hype, and hype without business results is worthless. So, I pushed our Sales team hard to try and find a retail tie-in here to capture pre-order from the event. What we ended up with was one of PlayStation's biggest (at the time) partnerships ever with Amazon. We gave Amazon exclusive rights to partner around the event, and drove some of our creative towards Amazon. In exchange, they gave us hundreds of thousands of dollars in co-marketing support and premium product hosting, as well as pre-promotion in the form of a sweepstakes to send a couple lucky fans to the screening. It was instrumental in helping translate awareness into pre-orders, and we augmented this with a modest paid digital spend across search and social channels to capture search intent.
The second notable promotional activity we did was (we thought) a clever little guerrilla tactic, which admittedly backfired a bit on us. The streets of NYC commonly feature street vendors selling the scripts to big-name movies during Tribeca. Considering we were trying to take our place alongside film's greats, and Beyond's script dwarfs a standard film's in sheer length, we thought it would be a fun value message to "sell" Beyond's "script" (really, it was two cover pages and a stack of blank sheets) at a few select street vending locations around the screening. We also sent a few bundles of these "scripts" out to press as a teaser before the event. Unfortunately, we didn't realize that these happened to go out the day after Earth Day, which drew some criticism from an outlet or two for wasting paper. In our defense, we were conscious of environmental impact while planning this, and both created these entirely from recycled paper, and included a note alongside them encouraging the recipients to use the paper in their office printers after opening. However, the lesson learned was to be extra-careful of timing, and ask yourself twice all the negative ways a tactic can be perceived before executing on it.