celebrating 10 years
and still kicking
PikPok’s most successful franchise to date had its humble beginnings in December 2012, with the launch of Into the Dead, a revolutionary endless runner x first person shooter for mobile. In December 2022 we launched the Into the Dead: 10th Anniversary campaign as a way to breath a renewed sense of life into the franchise. With respect for the work done over the decade, a whole lot of content ready to be dropped amongst the campaign, and an excited eye for what was to come for the franchise, we decided on a campaign that aptly surrounded 3 pieces of video content, connecting to the Past, Present & Future.
The primary campaign was built towards with some faux radio frequency interruptions, hosted on our YouTube channel. Players had spent many years of commenting on our YouTube channel asking what was next for the franchise, so there were no doubts they would be intrigued immediately at influx of mysterious content. We knew the radio frequency concept would resonate especially considering its heavy significance within the franchise.
The Present was all about the second entry into the franchise, with even more developer insight, and some huge announcements for content that dropped alongside the livestream. We knew that we had to hold our viewer interest through this portion of the campaign, as they were more likely be holding out for the content announcing our future plans.
Though viewership dropped slightly (as expected), we managed to maintain a significant portion of viewers from the prior content, and keep them happy and hungry for more.
In addition to our video content, we’d also launched a beer in collaboration with Wellington’s (and arguably New Zealand’s) favourite craft brewery: Garage Project. This sold out almost immediately at Garage Project, and aided in bringing new sets of eyes not only to the franchise and PikPok itself, but also to the games industry in general. Whilst a lot of people associate Wellington and New Zealand with the film industry, the games industry has been pulling its weight financially with a mere fraction of the social recognition, so we were happy to make even a small contribution to the visibility efforts.
The Future was the campaign content everyone was holding out for (creator and consumer alike). In this we had several bombshells to drop including the introduction of not one, but two new entries into the franchise. This was ultimately the first piece of setup for the campaign for Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days Making Zombies Empathetic in the 80’s which would send us hurtling on a trajectory for success.
Viewership picked right back up here, peaking just above the 30,000 viewer average, and leading to even larger numbers of viewership for the first piece of content in the campaign mentioned above, hitting over a million views.
This final piece of content was emboldened by the reveal of Into the Dead 3, a direct sequel that fans have been hounding PikPok for since long before I was employed. So we gave them just a small taste of what was in store, bringing in actor Madeleine Adams to voice a now grown up Maggie (daughter of the protagonist in Into the Dead 2) and working in some small details about planned features, all the while dealing with a tight deadline and an even tighter budget.
As a sort of bonus component to this campaign, we did some live, stripped back music videos of some of the more popular songs to featuring in marketing campaigns for the first and second games. These are notably popular in the franchise community, so we were confident in their ability to keep viewers invested across the month, all the while giving them an exclusive take on something they loved.
The Past was all about the first entry into the franchise, featuring discussions with original developers and the CEO of PikPok, Mario Wynands. Intended as a piquing of interest and a recap of the leaps and bounds made creatively and technologically since the inception of the first Into the Dead, this beat had to grab players attention and funnel them into our month-long campaign.
All pieces of content in the campaign maintained a healthy amount of viewers, averaging out at about 30,000 at the time of streaming, with an additional 10-15,000 viewers per video flowing in after the fact.