Valuable ally / As we’ve covered in our trend, the number of gamers has exploded in recent years – 81% of Gen Z play video games – making the gaming space a gold mine for brands. But if your brand doesn’t have an obvious link to that world, the risk is creating marketing that is disconnected from gamers’ tastes and habits, jarring them out of their enjoyment and, if anything, creating antipathy instead of engagement.
For a cosmetics brand like Maybelline NY – which has no obvious ties to gaming – creating an impactful campaign that makes sense for the brand and feels authentic is no mean feat. Here, Australia’s number one makeup brand found a way to make its initiative feel seamless by anchoring it in its brand mission, ‘give everyone the self-confidence to express their beauty, to play and to make change’. The insight that people suffer from skyrocketing amounts of harassment links to its existing brand platform Maybelline Brave Together, a global mental health programme to destigmatise anxiety and depression. It gives Maybelline’s voice legitimacy and credibility to act in the space, allying with its target audience – who also game.
A Dove campaign released earlier this year used a similar strategy. It deployed its long-standing brand platform around challenging unrealistic beauty standards to champion more inclusive representation in gaming. For beauty brands and the like looking to make successful gaming campaigns take note: look at what your brand does best (in both cases building women’s self-esteem) and use that as a means to enter and add value.
Show don’t tell / Even with the connection with Maybelline’s brand platform and larger purpose, Through Your Eyes wouldn’t have hit home without the right execution. Here, the brand used recognisable Aussie gamers to make sure the campaign resonated with their followers and had broad appeal beyond beauty. As for the film itself, the undercover concept in the video is a powerful way to make the point that discrimination in gaming is pervasive. The social experiment is eminently PR-able too (see also Dove’s Detox Your Feed), and the suitably humbled bro gamers by the experiment’s end ensure that the brutal reality of the female online gaming experience doesn’t remain abstract.
This campaign is also good example of how brands can shed light on lesser-known narratives and issues in a way that feels striking and legitimate, rather than opportunistic and tokenistic. As we note in our Untold Stories trend, ‘By uplifting marginalised voices and communities, brands can resonate with more people, and earn the trust of specific communities, while generating goodwill for using their platforms for positive impact.’
