Cannes Lions

Cards Against Humanity Saves America

CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY, Chicago / CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY / 2018

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Overview

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Credits

Overview

Description

One of our favorite comedians is Stephen Colbert, from the Colbert Report era. Much like Colbert, the figure of Cards Against Humanity is "in character" and "out of character." We're out of character when we're giving interviews or talking to the nice people who judge Cannes awards.

From the outset, we knew that this would be the loudest, weirdest, and the most rebellious our character has ever been. Trump is loud--we wanted to be louder. This quote from George Carlin has always inspired us: "When you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding their whole being for the moment. That's when new ideas can be implanted."

Execution

It took all summer long to coordinate six days of stunts (and keep them all secret). We’re a staff of twenty-five weirdos, and we do nearly everything in-house: design, marketing, comedy writing, web development, all of it. We wanted the world to think “how in the world did that stupid card game pull that off?”

We took money from our fans and gave it to people who needed it more; we produced a podcast that has 70,000 daily listeners and runs completely ad-free; we created a tremendous public stunt to protest Trump's dumbass wall; we sent 900,000 pieces of mail to our fans as gifts.

Each day had to feel like an improv scene, where we set up the joke, and then our fans run with it. And we unveiled each day, one by one, at CardsAgainstHumanitySavesAmerica.com.

Outcome

Received multiple days of coverage in every major news outlet, including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, AdWeek, Business Insider, TIME, The Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, and more.

Cards Against Humanity retained its status as the best-selling, most-wished-for, and best-reviewed toy or game on Amazon.com.

With nine tweets from us, we earned 1,724,034 organic Twitter impressions, 130,938 overall engagements, and maintained an engagement rate of 5.5%. We’ve never paid to promote our social media posts because we think that's a little silly.

Announcement email received a 33.1% open-rate on MailChimp; 13% higher than the gaming industry average (20.82%); 16% higher than the marketing and advertising average (17.81%).

The Good News Podcast has over one million downloads & was named “New and Noteworthy” on iTunes.

We matched $100,000 worth of donations for DonorsChoose.org, providing supplies, books, gym equipment, and field trips to low-income classrooms around the country.

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