The Objective
Outfit7 is a Slovenian-Cypriot online game development studio, known for their Talking Tom & Friends app and associated games and media.
Their popular casual game Talking Tom Gold Run is based on the original Talking Tom Cat, a character that’s widely known and loved from their children’s web series. The appeal of this game lies in the nostalgia that we all possess around those (fictional or not) who grew up with us when we were kids.
Since the game’s launch in 2018, Outfit7 has been trying to maintain interest around this game, while also spreading awareness and attracting new users. They believed that if more people knew about the game, more people would be drawn to their beloved Talking Tom Cat character, and the quicker they might try out playing the game.
Their objectives were three-fold: Awareness, Engagement, and Game Downloads. They planned to take advantage of the Chinese New Year holiday to launch something special and creative, to attract interest and quickly lead users down the conversion path from awareness to download. To efficiently achieve their goals, they tapped into Douyin’s powerful platform and community.
The Solution
Outfit7 decided to run a campaign on Douyin, a platform with which they already had a longstanding partnership, during the big Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) period. The Chinese market is valuable to them, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect to launch something creative and memorable.
Outfit7 launched a challenge called #TomFamilyTooHappy to invite users to “Run with the Tom Cat Family” and “Get Richer as You Run” during the Chinese New Year peak traffic period. They came up with the great idea to link their Mission campaign to the Year of the Rabbit, making use of the phonetic similarities with the word ‘too.’ Through this campaign, users were incentivized to collect a hundred gold bricks for a successful and prosperous new year.
They opted for Mission For All (Performance Mode), which uses rewards to encourage influencers and users to participate by creating their own videos. The Mission For All format enabled them to attract influencers to drive mass participation in the form of user-generated content (UGC). This challenge rallied users to join the conversation and create their own content, in response to the challenge.
Performance Mode meant that high-quality user-generated videos automatically contained game download buttons, which resulted in heightened visibility around the game, increased traffic, and higher conversion rates. Users who viewed the content could seamlessly download the game, which was a big win for Outfit7! Videos that got higher clicks and conversions benefited from a traffic boost.
This resulted in an exciting flurry of brand, influencer, and user-generated content around Talking Tom Gold Run on Douyin, building hype and awareness around the game, as well as conversion. The timing of the campaign was also perfectly aligned to the traffic spikes during Chinese New Year (Spring Festival), which allowed Outfit7 to further boost exposure and accelerate game downloads.
Ad Products
The Results
- 2.01% CTR of the Game Hub; exceeding industry benchmark by 3x
- 31K+ Android game downloads (with 42% complete installation)
- +524% Increase in Search index
- 100M+ Total views of all campaign videos
The Mission For All (Performance Mode) which engaged influencers was the perfect way to build hype, while strengthening the emotional connection that potential players would have with the Talking Tom Cat character. Outfit7 successfully tapped into the power of childhood memories and UGC to accelerate downloads.
