Who needs Willy Wonka’s golden ticket when Pat McGrath is offering a diamond ring?
To announce the beauty brand’s latest lip- and nail-product collaboration, this time with mobile gaming giant Candy Crush Saga, Pat McGrath sent PR boxes to influencers including Alex Consani and Tefi Pessoa, promising new lipsticks and a special edition, $10,000 diamond- and ruby-encrusted rings to celebrate. But in a branded twist, the rings seemed to have gone “missing” and instead were made available for customers to potentially find and keep for themselves when they ordered items from the collection.
The stunt was meant to not only increase the stakes and surprise of a product reveal, but also to gamify the customer experience, according to Luken Aragon, VP of marketing for Candy Crush at King.
“What we wanted to do was something that will surprise people and tell a story, something that will feel a bit bigger than makeup,” Aragon told us. “That twist made the campaign feel a bit more real, a bit closer to how we see…gaming in the real world.”
Finders keepers
In creating the campaign, Aragon said it was important to choose influencers who were not just relevant, but were actually friends with makeup artist Pat McGrath herself.
“We didn’t want just to work with an influencer because they had a large base of followers,” he said. “We wanted actually real connections so the campaign would feel a bit more personal.”
In the teasing phase of the campaign, the team leveraged Pessoa and Consani’s real relationship with McGrath to stage FaceTime-like calls after they “realized” the rings were missing from their packages, which were posted on TikTok and Instagram. Overall, the posts garnered 3.2 million views, about 15,000 likes, and “a ton of comments,” Aragon said.
From there, the collaboration was officially announced, and customers could enter a sweepstakes for a chance to win the rings. With such high-value prizes, Aragon said his team kept a close eye on each step of the process.
“From product delivery to customer support to the sweepstakes rules, every detail actually matters here to really make that campaign a success,” he said. “It was, obviously at that scale, always a good challenge.”
Though mostly designed for social media, the campaign was also advertised on the Candy Crush gaming platform itself, which Aragon said has a player base of 150 million players per year. Making it visible on the mobile app was aimed at helping position the partnership in the cultural conversation.
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“Within our mission to attract the maximum number of players, is actually to also engage with the audience,” he said. “We leveraged that content to do both jobs.”
The beautiful game
Beauty and gaming might seem like an unexpected pair, but Aragon said the nature of both industry’s customers are similar at their core.
Where a Pat McGrath customer might look for color, joy, and experimentation through beauty products, a Candy Crush gamer looks for similar things on the app, according to Aragon, and putting the two together helped contextualize gaming as a potentially more desirable advertising space. Candy Crush often generates over $1 billion in revenue per year and operates on an ad-supported freemium model that has become a blueprint in the gaming world, according to Business of Apps.
“This collaboration really helped us show that gaming isn’t just about some core and niche audience,” he said. “We can actually occupy this more cultural space.”
That effort to highlight the broad appeal of gaming is an enduring endeavor in the gaming advertising world. At this year’s PlayFronts, Zoe Soon, VP of the IAB’s Experience Center, opened the event by acknowledging that gaming only makes up 5% of total digital advertising spend, while reps from PlayFronts presenter and mobile game publisher Zynga noted that mobile game players in particular are reliable spenders. “Over 88% are the primary retail shopper of the household,” Gabrielle Heyman, Zynga’s VP of global brand sales and partnership, said in her presentation, and mobile gamers are more likely than nongamers to be in the market for new products and services in categories ranging from technology, furniture, and credit cards.
Aragon said the opportunities to use unexpected mediums like mobile gaming can help continue to grow brands like Pat McGrath and unite different corners of the pop culture world.
“The more we actually think about those kinds of interactions, the more we want to explore things that come across as nonobvious, but are actually crucial [and] really high potential,” Aragon said.
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