Employees of an Outfit7 subsidiary Neja Bizjak, Senior Lead Marketing Expert, Nina Jančič, Senior Lead Marketing Designer, and Žan Žveplan, marketing Creative Director, discuss the year's biggest and most successful My Talking Angela 2 campaign. Between them, they share insights into the creative process, player involvement, challenges, and their ambitions for the future.
Where did ideas for the My Talking Angela fashion campaign come from?
Neja:. Building on the momentum of the summer campaign where Outfit7 celebrated My Talking Tom 2’s 10th Anniversary, we wanted to prepare something unique for Talking Angela that would impact the reach and bottom-line downloads. We aimed for a worldwide campaign across all of the channels (e.g. store event, PUA, cross-promo, top of the funnel, PR, …)
Žan: Creatively we always primarily try to find inspiration within the game, which features a lot of customization options and emphasizes the users' freedom to explore their creativity. An idea that we thought had a lot of potential was creating a mini-fashion collection for Angela that would be exciting for the users and offer them something special.
Nina: Yes, exactly. We wanted to highlight Angela’s individuality while following the latest fashion trends and encourage players of Outfit7 games to do the same.
Žan: Then to top all that off, we added a contest for users to design a dress themselves and have it be part of that collection. From that, the narrative of the campaign was born - it was all about "owning your style".
How did you arrive at the idea of a UGC (user-generated content) fashion design contest?
Neja: We have a strong sense of community around our games. On social media alone we have more than 30 million followers, and we felt like we could do something with all those voices. We felt strongly about giving back to the community by allowing them to have a say in the game.
Žan: UGC started with very small activations throughout our campaigns. We identified that it has a lot of creative and performance potential, so we continued thinking about how to push it through on a bigger scope. We did intensive research and came up with the idea that users could make their own dress to be featured in the game and be in the running for a huge prize pool of 10 thousand dollars.
What challenges did you face while working on the UGC fashion design contest?
Neja: Just implementing a contest on such a large scale was quite a big challenge. We had to carefully set a challenge that appealed to users, while also ensuring it aligned with the campaign goals. It was very important that everything would be fair when it came to submissions. Participants had rules to follow, and getting that right was crucial.
Nina: We also had to set parameters for the contest entries. It was important that the dress they were designing fit within the existing mini-collection. It needed to be cohesive and part of the campaign fashion story.
How did you select three winners from so many entries?
Nina: We had a jury with people from product and game art departments, as well as an external contractor. At first, we evaluated thousands of submissions and filtered out the uneligible ones. Through this process, we narrowed down the selection to around 200 submissions. The final round consisted of head-to-head comparison with the highest-scoring three being crowned the winners.
How well did the campaign perform and how did the fans react?
Neja: The campaign drove a surge in installs and daily active users of My Talking Angela 2. And Outfit7 fans loved it! There was a lot of excitement surrounding the new fashion collection through messages and shares on social media, TikTok, and YouTube. The UGC contest also saw a lot of buzz, where users really appreciated the opportunity to create something unique for the game. It's been very nice to see that positivity.
Any final thoughts on the campaign?
Neja: In January, the first-place winning dress was added to the game, so check it out! We are excited about how the implementation is turning out and hope the players will like it as well.
Žan: It was extremely rewarding to work on it and we’re now looking forward to ways to do this with future updates and game launches. We’ll build on learnings, and aim to maximize the impact and continue with community engagement.
Nina: I'm super happy with how the visual aspects turned out. It's rewarding to hear positive feedback from the players, and incorporating contemporary trends into the design while staying true to the intended audience was a satisfying challenge.
My Talking Angela 2
