Influencer marketing | Campaign strategy | Creative and content | Event Production
How Viral Nation drove global awareness for the PUBG MOBILE STAR CHALLENGE in Dubai
In the fast-moving, high-stakes gaming industry, publishers compete as fiercely as the players themselves. And one surefire way to stand apart is a global tournament — with big prize money at stake.
So when Tencent Games began planning their PUBG MOBILE STAR CHALLENGE in Dubai, they turned to Viral Nation to mobilize over 100 global influencers and supercharge fans around the world.
About PUBG Mobile
PUBG MOBILE is a free-to-play battle royale video game developed by LightSpeed & Quantum Studio, a division of Tencent Games. Since its launch, PUBG MOBILE has experienced unprecedented success, with over 600 million downloads and 50 million daily active players in over 200 countries and regions.
Opportunity
When Tencent Games hosted the first-ever mobile esports tournament for PUBG MOBILE (which, at the time, was the largest mobile esports event in the world), they approached Viral Nation to market the event to audiences across 15 different countries.
Aiming to drive mass awareness and attendance to the PUBG MOBILE STAR CHALLENGE GLOBAL FINALS (PMSC) in Dubai, Viral Nation launched an international influencer marketing and PR campaign with a multi-platform strategy to achieve maximum results.
Strategy
Setting out to achieve 50 million social media impressions and 60 million media impressions over the course of the month-long campaign, Viral Nation led creative strategy and orchestrated a massive global influencer campaign to drive awareness for the PMSC in Dubai.
This campaign required extensive planning and management of influencers across different countries, time zones, and languages. Viral Nation activated over 100 international and local (Dubai) influencers across five social media platforms (Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube), and engaged key international media contacts to promote and rebroadcast the PMSC live stream.
13 prominent gaming influencers (also known as KOLs or “country leaders”) from the United States, Brazil, Turkey, China, Japan, Korea, India, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, Iraq, UAE and Thailand were also contracted to attend and promote the PMSC, representing their respective country teams. We planned a week full of activities in Dubai days before the tournament, offering settings which invited creative and engaging content creation.
Campaign in Action
The campaign kicked off with “pre-heat” content including advance media coverage, KOLs documenting their flights to Dubai and plans for the week, and social publishers promoting tickets or livestream links, encouraging fans to tune in.
Upon arrival in Dubai, Viral Nation accompanied influencers on a city tour where they visited the Burj Khalifa, Burj Club, Dubai Parks and Resorts and more. Influencers filmed content using #PMSC2018 to promote the tournament, including strong calls to action encouraging their audiences to tune-in online.
Viral Nation also partnered with YouTube Space Dubai to host a full day of filming for the global influencers. Collaborating with a production team from the UK to conceptualize and produce a six-hour livestream “pre-show” event on PUBG MOBILE’s YouTube channel, we coordinated interviews and challenges with each country leader to help promote and build excitement for the PMSC in the days leading up to the tournament. We also commissioned translation services to develop digital cue cards which would display interview questions for each individual influencer in their native language. The pre-show livestream successfully brought in over 350,000 viewers in just under a day.
Finally, we created and distributed a hype video recapping all of the exciting events that took place throughout the week in Dubai and engaged influencers and our large network of social publishers to share the clip with their audiences.
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner
When a team wins a match in PUBG MOBILE, they’re congratulated with the on-screen message Winner Winner Chicken Dinner. But based on its massive reach and global impact, the same could be said for this campaign.
Viral Nation was able to increase awareness of the PMSC through the activation of 142 global influencers, 360 posts and 41 media placements. With advance promotional content being broadcast in over 15 different languages, we were able to expand the tournament’s global reach exponentially.
The huge reach of this campaign and the success of the world’s first PUBG MOBILE STAR CHALLENGE helped Tencent catapult its award-winning game into the hands and hearts of 100s of millions of daily active players around the world.