Mountain Dew was facing a constant challenge when it came to building association with its target audience in Pakistan. The brand’s global communication was not resonating with the audience, as the passion points it addressed were unheard of by the local consumer. Research studies conducted to identify the disconnect suggested that food, music and cricket are the biggest platforms of entertainment in Pakistan with a huge audience following. Except, it also gave us an insight about our younger audience and that was to highlight the untapped passion point and a general inclination towards online/electronic gaming. Mountain Dew wanted to leverage gaming as a platform that would allow consumers to be a part of something that they can easily experience individually and as well as a community. The main objective for first year of the campaign was to promote gaming and bring eSports awareness in Pakistan.

The results showed that search queries on gaming grew 4x in the past 3 years and more than 200 gaming dens exist in the country. 38% of our target audience had shown interest in online gaming where DOTA and Counter Strike are the two top played games. Despite the huge potential and increasing interest levels, little had been done to support e-sports ecosystem in Pakistan. Mountain Dew decided to fill this void by venturing into the electronic sports space in Pakistan. The goal was to encourage community gamers by providing them with an opportunity through this platform. An opportunity that holds the promise of a rewarding career together with recognition in the field. Mountain Dew aimed to not only give youth an opportunity but also create an ecosystem that will support all inspiring gamers via the biggest online gaming tournament of Pakistan.

In the absence of gaming infrastructure in Pakistan we strategized digital media by extracting the audience insights to reach relevant audience. More than 60% of our audience is using online mediums. We capitalized on the platforms with the greatest audience penetration to build campaign awareness and redirect them to our website for competition details and registrations. The campaign was divided into three phases.

Phase 1: Awareness: We started with competition announcement on social media. Further we ran custom messages to drive registrations through programmatic banner ads. Phase 2: Qualifiers; To keep the audience involved we promoted tournament rounds via live feeds on YouTube and Facebook. To ignite the audience interest we did a PR stunt making 2 notable celebrities challenge each other and play LIVE on Facebook. Phase 3: Amplify the grand finale; YouTube LIVE Masthead, Print AR on Facebook, Drive event footfall via app

We started with a cross-channel promotional strategy to recruit gamers online and register on our website through YouTube and Facebook ads. To ensure effective message propagation, we displayed custom messages through programmatic banner ads. The qualifiers were broadcasted LIVE on YouTube & Facebook to keep the audience interested about the competition progression.To maximize impact, the finale was streamed LIVE for the first time in Pakistan on YouTube masthead. We ensured reliability of our tournament winners journey through an innovative AR based print magazine execution; integrated with Facebook. Another Pakistan first where we innovated a product to connect with our offline audience. This approach allowed us to ensure that our audience remain engaged and aspiring gamers were left feeling inspired. Lastly, we enabled people to register via app to attend the event and witness the national platform dew has created, which will support them to advance the true gamer in them.

The campaign reached 70% of our target audience in Pakistan. Due to relevant targeting, we received an overwhelming response to the competition where the total entries received were 82% higher than what was expected. The campaign generated: 267M+ in ad impressions, 15M+ video views, 18M+ Ad Engagement, 38.4% lift in Ad recall on YouTube. The publications covered the event reaching over 1.5M people. We saw 10% engagement rate on qualifiers LIVE broadcasts with reach of 9M+. 8M+ people saw the competition finale on YouTube LIVE, #DewGamerArena was mentioned over 1.7k times on Instagram. Over 1k people registered for finale event via app. Brand KPI’s experienced an 8pt lift; where people believed that Mountain Dew as a brand is setting new trends. 6% more audience believed that Dew is an adventurous brand.