The challenge:

Nicabate Oral Strips gave us a small budget to experiment with a way to calm smokers during a stressful craving period.

The strategy/insight:

Increasingly, the gaming industry has noticed an unexpected effect: games lower stress. What if we could apply this to people who are the most stressed - those trying to quit smoking?

Idea:

Nicabate Game to Quit. The world's first therapeutic game to work in tandem with a therapeutic product.

Execution:

We created a 50 second mobile game designed to relax smokers while waiting for craving relief.

Hundreds of design decisions were made from calming colours to soothing gameplay to an original soundtrack to induce a state of zen.

Outcome:

With just an initial small scale banner promotion, we've already had thousands of downloads.

Game to Quit is being considered for wider roll out in New Year 2016.

Every design decision in Game to Quit was made to relax users. And music played an essential part.

Our 50-second soundtrack needed to be as calming as possible. To do this, we tested different compositions to see which had the most soothing effect on smokers.

Effective aspects were:

- A tempo of 60bpm to mimic a resting heart rate.

- Non-repetitive melodies.

- Delta sleep waves, which are felt and not heard.

- Low underlying bass tones that block out peripheral noise.

These elements were combined to create a beautiful track that induced a state of deep relaxation.

The game was promoted on a limited scale through a handful of banner ads, a medium with a response rate of 0.1%.

Even so, over a thousand people downloaded the game within the three-week media period.

Game to Quit is being considered for wider roll out in New Year 2016.