Fame game / The Most Valuable Promo bypasses advertising restrictions to embed Almacenes Éxito in a space where there are no other brands competing for users’ attention, giving the retailer an outsized chance at being noticed and remembered.
The influencers were the brand’s ticket into the game, but also guaranteed a certain amount of audience interest by virtue of their popularity, and amplified the reach of the campaign by broadcasting it to their fans on social media (the most popular of the three gamers involved in this campaign has over 200,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel).
Worth killing for / But Almacenes Éxito and Sancho BBDO deserve credit for designing a promotion that leverages the influencers’ popularity, rather than just piggy-backing on it.
The brand and agency show a good understanding of Call of Duty: Mobile, using the influencers’ tags and profile pictures to convey their promotions. And turning the influencers into targets that players must kill to win the discounts adds a fun and competitive element to the promotion.
More than that, it adds value to the discounts themselves, as the high rate of redemption (see the results section above) demonstrates.
Robert Cialdini best captures this phenomenon in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. He cites a 1959 study by Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, who tested the observation that ‘persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.’ In Aronson and Mills’ experiment, women who had to endure an embarrassing initiation to gain entry to a group valued that membership more than those who were just waived through.
By making gamers hunt and kill some of the best Call of Duty: Mobile players to earn a discount, they are forcing them to invest time and effort into securing the vouchers (as well as attaching some kudos to the achievement) meaning they are more likely to value it and use those discounts.
