Raise the Game: Building a powerful brand marketing campaign

When you look at brand marketing tactics through the lens of the marketing funnel, they sit at the top, as a consumer’s first contact with the brand. Typically, these have a broad reach, like TV or radio adverts, and are story-focused to drive the memory of the brand or product. 

Our most recent campaign for Lightning Link Casino, one of our most popular titles, launched on connected TV (CTV) across the US, and leveraged some existing brand awareness. As part of Aristocrat Leisure, makers of games that entertain millions of players everyday, we're fortunate to have access to a library of well-known game characters and digital content.

Leveraging this IP was one of the key factors in our creative process, alongside emphasis on the product name and the fact that the app serves the free-to-play social casino genre.

Taking the advert from concept to screen involved many stages and many people. Our customer-focused value ensured we worked with real players and our consumer insights team to get a genuine understanding of what worked, and what didn’t, right at the very beginning of the concepting stage. We also took learnings from previous brand marketing creative.

Pre-production saw us choose our cast, wardrobe, props, and location - the latter of which had to be relevant to our audience (i.e. somewhere they would actually play, with internet access) and have plenty of opportunities for heavy branding. As such, we settled on an American diner. 

Three separate creatives were generated, each focusing on a different slot game from within the app. Encouraging and enabling Responsible Gameplay is fundamental to our business and shapes how we design and market our games. That's why all three creatives show players who switch between gameplay and enjoying the in-diner experience, and comply with our internal policies and industry best practices on this score.

This advert was initially created for CTV audiences, as we’ve seen success across this channel before, but this was the first instance of us using bespoke branded content for it. This gave us the opportunity to truly supercharge our performance in this area. 

We also wanted it to be adaptable to other media channels to serve customers at later stages of the funnel through performance marketing platforms - think social media and search engines. As well as being resized, we ensured from the outset that the messaging could land without the need for a voiceover, catering for those social media users who scroll with their sound off. 

In short, our campaign put customers front and centre, featured some of our most-loved game characters in an innovative new way, and had the flexibility to work across a range of platforms, which has given us positive momentum already in the first few weeks of launch.