A little background

The strategy was straight-forward:

  • Launch an event that would really capture the imagination of our target audience;
  • Engage with this audience and raise the profile of AXA as an employer of young people;
  • Build a database of highly-engaged, AXA-aware young people across the world;
  • Invite applications to the Global Graduate Program.

The resulting competition was the Great Global Adventure by AXA. By offering the most desirable prize in graduate recruitment history – a 12 month all expenses paid world trip including two internships and a place on an AXA volunteering project – AXA would create something fun and disruptive that really got their target audience talking.

The game itself

The game is essentially a Google Maps-powered treasure hunt. Players travel the world answering general knowledge questions and solving puzzles as they go. Each time, each challenge, they are looking for an AXA pin – the location of an AXA office somewhere in the world. Once the player has found the pin, they are delivered a challenge based on either the location they are in or a challenge that reinforces AXA’s global, innovative or socially responsible nature.

As the player completes the challenges they are awarded points, achieve awards and are encouraged to share their progress on social media. Bonus points were also available for those who, once they had finished the game, shared their ‘perfect journey’ of five cities that they would love to visit should they win, with their social networks.

To ensure the game could be played on all devices, it was built to be responsive in nature. It was also optimised to ensure that the game and pages loaded quickly so that people playing on a 3G enabled device would have no less of an advantage (or a lesser gaming experience) than someone playing on a 4G or wireless broadband connection.

The promotion of the game

The Great Global Adventure was a key way of raising the profile of AXA as a graduate employer on campus. This included leaflets passed out at University careers fairs, posters around campus and emails that were sent out through the University’s careers service.

The Great Global Adventure was promoted through a wide variety of media:

  • Programmatic advertising aimed at 18-24 year olds;
  • Social media advertising across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter;
  • Google advertising aimed at those looking for student competition;
  • Email advertising through Universum;
  • Email advertising through Student Competitions;
  • Re-targeting advertising for those who visited the game but did not register their details;
  • Follow-up marketing to those who registered to play the game but did not complete it;

The Discover AXA social media channels were used to promote the game using both organic and promoted posts, creative content and a focused blogger outreach initiative.

A short case study

It isn’t easy telling the story of this campaign in words and pictures, so we’ve made a short film to talk about the brief, the competition, the game, the results and the legacy of the Great Global Adventure by AXA. Enjoy.

The performance of the campaign

During the six months that the game was open, all advertising was served via a third party and all activity was monitored using Google Analytics and DoubleClick.

During the six months that the game was open, people from over 221 countries and territories played the game with an average game time of 44 minutes.

We also saw that over 2,341 people completed the game on their smartphone or tablet. If we had just built the game to be played on a desktop or laptop then the Great Global Adventure would have missed out on almost 30% of entries.

220118
visits to the game
25914
players
8149
finished games

If you’d like to know more about this piece of work just email mark@thatlittleagency.co.uk