KC Smith
Digital Marketing Portfolio
Asphalt 9: Legends was the second most popular mobile game at Gameloft, with a slightly older (25 to 35 years old) and more competitive audience. For that reason, I established a more serious and mature tone for the brand.
A great example of this tone is this launch trailer for the game which I scripted and edited. This is one of the few videos where I started with the voiceover, and then we added the visual elements to accentuate the narration. Within the first week, it received over 1 million views on YouTube, and steadily grew to over 4 million views - an exceptional achievement, considering there are only 1.3 million subscribers to the Asphalt YouTube channel.
Realizing just how fast this game's community was growing, I pushed to launch a Content Creator's Program for it right out of the gate. This was a program that I experimented with for GangStar: Vegas. The idea was to incentivize, guide, and curate user-generated content to bolster the game's creator community. Now I was ready to perfect the program for Asphalt 9 with a landing page for easy sign-ups, and plain language explanations of all the rules and regulations for joining.
The site attracted hundreds of applicants, of which a few dozen were accepted into the program. I personally talked to several of them to review their channels, offer advice, and share ideas for content that would best support our future marketing campaigns.
One of the truest passion projects I had the pleasure of creating at Gameloft (and one of our most successful campaigns to boot) was the Asphalt 9 X Hololive collab.
In one of my monthly Social Media Trends Reports, I noted the wave of VTubers (virtual YouTubers) taking over North American YouTube, and how they would soon be the influencers of choice for our partnerships. I was later contacted by the Asphalt 9 Product Manager to discuss ways of incorporating these anime idols into our marketing plan.
After brainstorming some campaign ideas, and analyzing which VTubers would actually be best for our target audience, I reached out to COVER Corp. and began discussions on what kind of partnership we could arrange, and which ideas of mine resonated with the creators themselves.
Finally, this event came to fruition, bringing Sakura Miko and Himemori Luna together in a head-to-head competition where the community got to race in an online eSports competition for their favorite idol's honor.
In total, this partnership activated over 100,000 event participants in-game, while streams of Miko and Luna playing our game were viewed nearly 1 million times.
In addition to working with anime personalities, I had the opportunity to write a mini-manga for Asphalt 9's "Godly Beasts" storyline. This series of YouTube videos acted as a prologue to the in-game plot, showing how the various antagonists the player would face were recruited by "The Syndicate."
For this project, I partnered with one of the best artists in Gameloft Barcelona, who not only turned my script into an authentic-looking manga but then went on to add all the animated effects that went into this YouTube video series.
One of the "Godly Beasts" featured in this story is Blue Rabbit, a trollish hacker who wants to free the world of authoritarian establishments. I thought they had great charisma, so I brought them to life on social media as a troll who hacked our account to drop "leaks" about future game updates. I used garbled text (that got more chaotic as they got angry) and ASCII art as their signature styles. This made their posts stand out on a feed, and caused fans to engage more in order to decipher each message. I tried to balance the chaotic look of each post with making it readable.
Following a strong initial reception, Blue Rabbit was featured in a special event where players could choose to support Blue Rabbit or Asphalt Security by completing certain missions in the game. Blue Rabbit encouraged people to play for their side, while reacting to their loss in a most satisfying way for players who backed Asphalt Security.
Despite losing the event, the character garnered a "rabbit" following, and would show up from time to time in future events.
eSports were a huge component of the Asphalt 9 marketing strategy, and we partnered with several brands to host tournaments. The largest of these was the Snapdragon Pro Series ESL. The concept was that anyone could enter the qualifying rounds by playing online from home, hence the tagline, "Welcome to the Era of Everyone." Those who made it to the finals were flown to a live event in Barcelona for the final showdown and a $5,000 Grand Prize.
As a racing game, it was only natural for us to partner with major car brands, but one of our biggest partnerships was with Lamborghini to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Lamborghini Countach. To help drive excitement, I researched the complete history of the legendary speed machine and reached out to our social media community to pitch interview questions. This all led to an extremely popular piece of content that was shared across social media and on several major gaming and car blogs.
