We needed to help dementia researchers discover more about the human brain, while also celebrating the power of shared memories in line with Deutsche Telekom’s belief that “Life is for sharing.”

Inspired by the success of mobile games – three billion hours a week is now spent playing games – we came up with a simple but revolutionary solution: integrate gaming and brain science. Get consumers involved and help researchers fight dementia by creating something addictive and entertaining.

We had to ensure that the science and the gaming were seamlessly integrated and navigation was the answer. Navigational skills are one of the first cognitive functions dementia sufferers lose, and a popular gaming genre.

The idea was to create the first mobile game that would challenge and record navigational skills of players around the world, creating a human benchmark for spatial navigation, against which dementia could be measured in the future.

Central to the success of Sea Hero Quest has been the need to drive downloads, one of the toughest tasks in media.

We launched in 16 languages, promoting the game via a perfect blend of international and local media partners.

Internationally, we worked with PewDiePie, an iconic gamer with more than 54m followers on YouTube and 9m on Twitter, to create content, a strategy replicated in many markets using local influencers.

We created a mini-game of SHQ, giving consumers the chance to road-test, linked directly to app-stores.

We appealed to our Emotional Philanthropists via an animated film telling the story of an ageing explorer who slowly loses his memories of past voyages to dementia. The animation was seeded across the mobile landscape, reaching our targets via in-apps and games platforms. In multiple markets we accessed forgotten password pages and page not found messages, highlighting the impact of lost memory.

To date, the app has been downloaded 2.8 million times. Total play time now exceeds 650,000 hours. With each two-minutes of gameplay equaling five hours of traditional research, Sea Hero Quest has provided data that would have taken more than 11,000 years to collect previously.

Our story was picked up by 2,700 media outlets globally. Total media value is estimated at more than €30m.

Sea Hero Quest was the #1 free game in tens of markets. It was featured as “Top New Game” globally on Google Play and on launch day it was the top trending search on the App Store.

Deutsche Telekom’s role has been widely recognized. In Germany we delivered an 18-point shift in brand approval, up from 49% to 67%.

The strongest shifts were for “inspiring” (+67%), “enriching life” (+43%), “relaxed” (+49%) and “natural” (+51%), fully in line with the brand’s broad “Life is for sharing.” proposition.