For their newest telenovela, Univision leveled up the action and mixed both Mexican and Japanese cultures into a thriller crime drama. The story of El Dragón is unlike the typical telenovela and therefore required a unique approach to drive awareness among the target audience.
As the leading Hispanic media company in the US, Univision boasts a strong Hispanic viewership who are highly aware of telenovelas, but typically associate them with romantic stories, geared towards women. This challenge meant showcasing El Dragón in new ways to reach an audience of young males and convert them to telenovela viewers. The campaign required not only reaching the audience, but capturing their attention long enough to learn more about the show and gaining their interest.
For El Dragón, the target audience was both male and female, age 18 - 34, with a particular focus on men due to the nature of the plot: an action packed crime drama. In addition, the show is in Spanish, targeting a Spanish-speaking Latino/Hispanic audience. In order to effectively reach the target audience for El Dragón, Univision looked for interactive creative that required viewer engagement through entertainment. This ensured the viewer would spend enough time with the creative to learn about the show and understand it was not your typical telenovela. Arguably, the most engaging and entertaining form of advertising is the playable ad unit.
Leaning on El Dragón’s plot, Gameloft created a mobile game based on the Japanese puzzle box, a highly engaging, challenging puzzle. Social prompts that allowed players to challenge friends were included to extend reach. In addition, players had the option to learn more through sections dedicated to the trailer, character bios, and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage. An interactive video unit that would showcase the action-packed footage was also created with existing El Dragón content, ensuring views and engagement through built-in interactive prompts like swipe and tilt and empowering the player to drive the story forward. Each of these creative was a full screen unit, designed to be highly impactful for optimal visibility and CTR. Additional display banners and interstitial banners were included to reinforce the message and keep El Dragón top of mind.
Univision leveraged Gameloft's network of premium games, which index high against the target audience, to reach players who were in an active, positive state-of-mind, and receptive to playable content. Univision was able to target their specific desired audience on their smartphones with the mobile playable ad unit through demographic information provided by players to Gameloft (age and sex) and phone setting details like language settings. These gamified ads ran in over 20 mobile games, focused on racing, sports, tycoon, and shooters games whose cohort overlapped with the target demographic for the El Dragón campaign.
To further drive effectiveness, Gameloft worked closely with the game design teams to integrate the game into the player experience, understanding when and how often to deliver the ads to any individual player and reinforcing Univision’s mission without interrupting gameplay or overwhelming the player. This campaign was four pronged in communication, with Interactive Video with Expandable Overlays (46%), Incentivized Minigame (19%), Static Banners (19%), and Static Interstitial (16%) all effective options used together to avoid fatigue.
In-game advertising offers a unique opportunity to engage a hard-to-reach audience in a brand safe environment with 100% viewability. This audience was also highly receptive providing Univision with a high impact opportunity. In fact, according to 2019 Tapjoy research, 41% of gamers are likely to pay attention to ads in mobile games, ahead of the internet (17%), magazines (15%) and billboards (15%). In addition, 72% of gamers said they like interacting with ads in exchange for in-app currency or premium content, which the El Dragón campaign offered to players.
To measure against the objectives, Gameloft looked at key metrics including how many players played or viewed the branded content, how long they engaged with it and if they moved on from the ad to learn more, like watching trailers or reading character biographies. This was measured by Impressions, engagements, time spent playing in minutes, and click-throughs.
The El Dragón campaign connected a local activation with a digital online game, promoting Hispanic programming in Chicago, one of the top markets for Univision’s Hispanic audience. There were over 100K attendees with many visiting the gaming unit during the activation via QR codes, and a Geo-fencing targeting tactic. The goal was to attract male millennial adults, 18-34 – catering to the show’s target demographic to ultimately increase tune-in and viewership.
Throughout the campaign with Gameloft for brands, Univision successfully reached its desired target audience with over 2.6 million impressions, 350,000 complete engagements and nearly 14,000 click-throughs. The campaign drove awareness for El Dragón, achieving its objective while engaging a high-value potential audience.
