Desperados
Charging our way to a 530% ROI with Desperados
The brief
With festival season on the horizon, Desperados came to us seeking a unique and unforgettable digital experience - emphasising their strong connection to music and creativity, whilst simultaneously bridging the gap between on and off-trade sales.
Armed with a host of Boomtown tickets as prizes, we set about creating a multi-faceted gamification piece; promoted across the on-trade and designed to encourage progression through both skill and the purchase of coded Desperados packs in shops.
Read on to see how we turned things up to 11, and achieved over 10,000 redemptions in the process...
Hey Mr DJ!
We knew we wanted to put the player right in the heart of the action, and what better way to experience the raw energy of a festival crowd than from the DJ booth?
And so we got to work, rapidly prototyping and wireframing ideas. We soon arrived at the concept of Charge - a virtual power meter of your DJing dexterity. Earn enough charge during your set and you unlock the next stage, unlock all stages and be in with a chance of winning those tickets. Watch out though! Miss too many beats and a career on local radio awaits.
We saw great numbers in the amount of online consumers we were able to reach through an exciting and engaging campaign and as a result managed to get great exposure for Boomtown and Desperados
Jack Wignall, Category Activation Manager
Getting the balance right
From experience we know online games built into campaigns should be quick and easy to play, with minimal instruction, a shallow learning curve and enough depth to keep players coming back for more.
For this game, the fewer mistakes made meant the higher the charge. For the perfectionist this posed a fun, but challenging experience, while equally giving casual gamers a more forgiving experience.
Cross platform compatibility
Whilst it may look like an App at first glance, the whole game was actually built using the latest HTML5 web technologies, so that it worked flawlessly across all modern browsers and devices.
The music
One part of the project we’re particularly proud of is that we produced all the audio in-house, ensuring that the genre for each stage matched a real zone or stage at Boomtown - Disco, Techno and Drum & Bass.
Each track was carefully constructed from between 2 and 5 individual layers, which each having to loop perfectly so that the player could fade them up without any obvious repetition.
Click the play icons below to listen to each of the finished pieces.
Area 404
Lion's Den