Ahead of the release of one of the most anticipated games of the year, we wanted to further celebrate and harness that anticipation into an engine of organic conversation and advocacy. Our objective was to harness existing anticipation among a core audience and turn it into further interest among the mass – after all, the most trusted recommendations for Gen Z don’t typically come from a brand itself, but from friends and connections on social media.
We knew core fans were already incredibly excited to play Starfield on Day 1, but we understood the need to broaden this excitement even further. While we had content supporting this title across our entire ecosystem, to most effectively harness our core community, we designed this execution for where they are the most vocal – Twitter/X.
We prompted the community to share their gamertags with us, and we replied with a manually crafted patch they could use as a profile picture on any social platform to celebrate becoming a part of Starfield’s Constellation. With a low barrier to participation and a personalized, functional payoff, core and new players flocked to our post. With the casual audience seeing overt organic excitement from other community members, we were able to raise awareness, but even more importantly – facilitate a flood of organic advocacy from the people gamers trust most, other gamers. By creating each badge manually, as opposed to going the route of automation, we were able to ensure all participants were vetted before associating their profile with official Starfield imagery. Moreover, this manual approach allowed us to provide alt text for each image, maximizing accessibility and the possibility of inclusion in the execution. In no time, social media feeds were flooded with Starfield imagery customized to fully lean into what people love talking about on social media – themselves.
With more than 80k replies, a record-breaking number of people and brands became members of Starfield’s Constellation that day, proudly displaying their custom mission patches on social. With engagement from prominent brands ranging from McDonald’s to Merriam Webster, and excitement from the larger gaming community, our Starfield Mission patch was an attention-grabbing, advocacy-harnessing success across the gaming industry and beyond. In addition to the incredible success on social, this campaign contributed to Starfield amassing 6 million players the week it launched. Both our core and larger gaming audiences were successfully activated.
