HP is a perennial underdog in the high-performance gaming PC market. This category is dominated by other big-brand competitors, and a build-your-own mentality among gamers. With only 35% awareness, and even lower purchase consideration, HP's Omen needed to be seen as a legitimate contender in order to support growth.

In early 2018, male-dominated e-Sports had image problems, as the gaming community was starting to come to terms with its gender-based toxicity. Female gamers, traditionally underpaid and often subjected to bullying in one form or another, were starting to challenge the status quo.

We saw an opportunity to build an unconventional partnership that would support a continued cultural evolution, encouraging the respect female gamers deserve, as well as overcoming the indifference and preconceptions about HP.

#Gamergate and pay inequality for female gamers has too often divided the wider community into the bullies and the bullied. This is a tricky space for an underdog brand to enter. We clearly couldn’t be associated with bullies, but also couldn’t afford to be amongst the bullied. So, we created a third option – celebrating a female gamer that also isn’t afraid of some healthy competition.

We developed the perfect opportunity to challenge gamer perceptions of HP while also elevating the community’s status quo through a ground-breaking partnership with a respected Canadian insider – Stephanie Harvey, a five-time world champion gamer, vocal advocate against gender discrimination in professional gaming, and winner of “Canada’s Smartest Person” (season 3).

A co-ordinated effort between PR, events & media allowed us to ensure that we were efficiently reaching the broad gaming community before, during and after key gaming expos across the country.

Seeking to credibly insert HP Omen within community conversations, when gamers were actively sharing and interaction was high, we partnered with Stephanie Harvey to ensure we were engaging them in an authentic manner.

In co-branded videos Miss Harvey gave gamers exclusive tips & tricks on how to compete. These were spread via social media and HP owned channels.

In a market first, we created a unique experience at fan expos across the country. Gamers lined up in the hundreds for a chance to compete head-to-head with Miss Harvey on an HP Omen set up.

In order to reach even more gamers, we geo-fenced the event in order to programmatically target attendees, and used social media triggers and A.I. targeting to message gamers actively sharing relevant content before and after the expo.

We further extended the campaign’s reach with takeovers on e-Sports coverage.

The combination of Miss Harvey’s reputation and the promotion strategy drove exceptionally high engagement levels at the events, with roughly 60% of attendees engaging with HP’s Omen booths.

Thanks to their unique content and highly targeted nature, interactions with ourdigital advertising was also exceptionally high, with ad engagement rates exceeding benchmarks by 4x.

By making HP ‘talk worthy’ and maximizing the reach amongst a pretty niche community with a targeted, high intensity campaign we delivered a massive increase in awareness. The pre-campaign awareness of 35% almost doubled to 65% - an 82% increase.

‘Fame-by-association’ in the category helped to deliver a significant lift in sales. Market share increased by 5.3 percentage points.

This lift was above our short term goal, and signals a potential to change HP’s long term PC gaming fortunes by building credibility with a highly discerning targeting audience.