Muddy ApplesBranded Video Games for Exhibitions and Events
Muddy ApplesThe award winning Atlassian app-maker Appfire Technologies, Inc., seeking an innovation that would make them stand out on a crowded trade show floor, approached us to build a game that would revitalize their event strategy and engage a tech-savvy crowd.
As a game prize, they invested heavily in both merchandising and a giveaway of their valuable app licenses for a free first year. However, they identified a complication: enterprise software prizes take a longer journey than the traditional giveaway and require the winner to be both knowledgeable and invested to ensure that the prize code is taken home and approved for installation by the office.
A simple game of luck wouldn’t do— they needed to spark competition and deep engagement.
Their target demographic was identified as incredibly diverse, globally-distributed, and historically resistant to one-size-fits-all in any form.
That said, our fast and fun platform games were the perfect fit to promote their suite of Atlassian apps at Summits across the globe starting in San Jose, where engagement metrics soon soared.
“Our competition on the floor is steep and it can be hard to capture the average’s attendee’s time, so when we saw lines of 5, 10, 15 people it blew us away.”
GrandFuego, as it was soon called, sparked a company-wide competition for the highest score before it hit the West Coast and inspired custom merch designed by the COO himself: an on-theme pillow shaped like a retro console cartridge.
“The night before the show floor opened, our executives requested a last-minute text change, which is common enough except for one major complication; several timezones away, a hurricane took out the data centers hosting the game. We were stuck, so Muddy Apples stepped in and saved us by advocating for our team basically overnight. He ensured that our game was hosted out of the storm’s path, and all the updates were packaged and ready far in advance of the show floor’s opening event. GrandFuego debuted beautifully.”
Appfire “apps,” represented by the logo, were scattered throughout the custom made games and collected by the player as they jump from platform to platform. As they get collected, the name pops up and adds 30 points to the score, incentivising collection over the logos worth one point. Both are critical for a top score!
For San Jose: We developed sprites for Appfire’s two product brand mascots to act as avatars, especially because the founders of each brand were available on-site to ask questions… and even pose for photos or sign a few autographs.
For Barcelona: After having acquired more brands, the client team preferred to stick with one main character, modeled after an engineer, Bob, whose brand at Appfire carries his name. Given his fame in the larger ecosystem, this playful approach also attracted attention and engagement from his curious fans.
All player scores were kept on a scoreboard posted openly in the trade show hall and on regular updates scripted by the Marketing team to share on Twitter, LinkedIn, and the Summit’s custom event app. This drove additional traffic to the booth as competition heated up and more contenders started to come back repeatedly to refine strategies for gaining increasingly tight leads over the course of the three days in the hall.
Previous years’ prizes were also apps, but the selection was based on luck rather than choice. As a result, many prizes were won, but the winner’s required action of adoption fell through and the apps were only very rarely installed.
To solve this with GrandFuego, players collected various prizes with a selection of high-scores winning their choice among 60+ types of Appfire software apps.
A message detailing the prize won (one app vs. 3, or even a larger suite) would automatically show up on the screen depending on the score. Every outcome necessitated a more detailed conversation with a product expert, who functioned much like a personal shopper. This ensured that the winner could advocate successfully for installing their prize upon returning home… or had a personal connection with Appfire if they needed more support.
In Barcelona, this strategy was also paired with a GDPR-compliant lead capture page that would send the code directly to the winner, lowering behavioral barriers to ensure that the prize would be far more likely to be put into their shopping cart and installed at the player’s place of work.