marketing mares
to the mobile masses
Rival Stars Horse Racing is PikPok’s most popular and profitable title, in large part thanks to its ethos of being as true to life and all for its community. Work marketing this game has been an ongoing effort since 2019, with a constantly growing player-base with a broad demographic. As my role and responsibilities have grown in the company, so too did my ambition with their top-selling title, and I made it a point to push the team to shift focus from algorithm satiating quantity, to player satisfying quality; I wanted to reconnect with that sense of authenticity that made this title resonate with its audience. The results speak for themselves; the work displayed below is some of the most viewed and engaged with content that the title (and studio) has ever released and player numbers for Rival Stars remain at an all-time high.
A large part of what resonates with the Rival Stars fan base, is the genuine fantasy of owning a stable full of beautiful horses of all different shapes and sizes. We have made an effort to lean into this whenever a new breed is announced, keeping an element of mystique and excitement to their reveal, all the while emphasising what makes each breed of horse truly unique. We treated these particular pieces of content more like product advertisements, sourcing a range of reference from cars to Apple products to get things feeling just right.
We really wanted to create distinct & memorable pieces of content for each breed, and I’m confident you’ll see that each has its own flavour and feel. Fans of the title have been absolutely lapping these up, and there were calls for the development team to up the storage space for horses in game following the launch of each piece of content.
Unsurprisingly the videos have performed outstandingly well, especially when compared to prior content created for the title. With the weakest performer still coming in at a whopping 70,000 views, whilst the top performer boasts 141k views.
Raise Your Dream Horse, was born out of this burning desire to make a TVC campaign work for Rival Stars. We steered right back into what we knew our players loved: raising a stable of horses & foals, bonding with them, training them, and then taking them out to ride. We showed off a larger variety of horses, with a focus on a breadth of riding-modes to try, and laid it all out in whimsical and relaxed tone; this was much more within the Rival Stars comfort zone.
As expected, this TVC campaign performed leagues better than the first. Raking in over 3 time its viewership and bringing a significant bump to the player-base.
Confident that we were barking up the right tree with a TVC, but that maybe we should be looking in a different forest audience-wise, we resolved to create another TV-focussed campaign that leant back into our more traditional selling points, appealing to a similar demographic, but with a wider lens.
In addition to regular social creative work, Rival Stars become so popular it was clear we could take a chance on some wider outreach. Our first proper campaign for the title, Make Your Own Odds, took a slightly unorthodox approach, aiming at a drastically different audience than the one we were used to marketing towards. This was a primarily TVC campaign, with additional support from social & digital content, aimed towards men in the betting community. Though not your first thought for a true-to-life horse game, the hypothesis was that we could appeal to their competitive nature through the racing aspect of the title, and hook into what made them enjoy watching the races in real life, when there were no races to watch.
While this gamble was not particularly successful, it still received a modest viewership and some community support for attempting to broaden the angle for a more diverse community.