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.

This campaign is a story of a company applying its skills to a huge social challenge: the rising number of dementia cases. It’s about using mobile gaming to help scientists understand the way that this disease affects the brain.

But it relies on media expertise to be successful. Unless enough people take part then the data gathered won’t be valuable or representative enough to help scientists in their urgent task.

Deutsche Telekom had the scale to reach enough people to make this approach not just powerful but also highly effective.

Sea Hero Quest would be the only mobile game where anyone can help scientists fight dementia.

We identified two key audiences: Emotional Philanthropists, those in search of ways to get involved in the issues they care about, who could give a small contribution of time to make a real impact on research into dementia, and Casual Gamers – giving them something they can play for two minutes while waiting for the train.

Our strategy would be designed to appeal to both. Firstly, by creating an incredibly exciting and engaging game and secondly, via a media strategy designed to make participation as easy as possible.

There would be two key principles: a heavy skew to mobile to ensure consumers were always one click from download and an emphasis on social, allowing us to tell the engaging story behind the game.

PR would also reach out directly to our emotional philanthropists.

Deutsche Telekom’s fundamental belief is that “Life is for sharing.” That means helping people all around the world share events, experiences and the moments that matter.

But what happens if we lose the ability to remember those special moments? Dementia is the single biggest threat to a shared life. It is also the next global health crisis; currently affecting 47.5m people worldwide and by 2050, this number is estimated to increase to 135 million.

Currently scientists have no understanding of where dementia comes from, how to stop it, or even how to detect its earliest signs. What they needed was data from healthy people at scale. This would help them understand more about the condition and develop benchmarks to detect it much earlier.

Traditional dementia research is limited. Even the biggest studies only attract a couple of hundred participants.

Our challenge was to find a way to boost participation.