A favourite digital PR campaign of ours for 2020 was our Animal Crossing ‘Virtual Interior Designers’. We ran this for Olivia’s, the luxury interiors and home furnishings brand.
We love this story so much that we even awarded it the much-coveted (in our office at least!) ‘Coverage of the Year 2020’ – an internal thing we like to do each year to choose our favourite campaigns from the last 12 months.
What we did for this digital PR campaign
For Olivia’s, our luxury interiors and home furnishings client, support ranges from creative, digital PR stories, to founder profile building and press office.
For this particular campaign we wanted to come up with something that was really creative and captured the imagination of people (who were mostly staying home) during 2020’s first lockdown. Our challenge was making Olivia’s stand out at a time when home office transformation and home DIY was suddenly top of the interiors agenda, with relevant brands all scrabbling for their share of voice in the space.
We spotted that gaming had become a huge thing in Spring 2020 thanks to the pandemic (it was reported that the gaming industry would reach £113bn in revenue in 2020, a 9.3% increase compared with 2019). We also knew about the massive hype around the newly released Nintendo Switch game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It had sold 11m copies just 11 days after launching.
Looking for innovative ways we could newsjack the game’s success, we created a campaign for Olivia’s to find ‘Virtual Interior Designer Consultants’ for Animal Crossing players. Essentially the interior designers would need to have a great knowledge of Animal Crossing but also a true flare for design. The designers could set their own rate but would typically be paid upwards of £40 per hour for their services in the virtual world.
We worked with Olivia’s to create two landing pages on site – one for budding virtual interior designers to sign-up and offer their services, and another where players could hire them.
We turned the whole campaign round in two days – from initial concept to live date – and issued the story to all relevant media in order to capitalise on the game’s success.
Results for our digital PR campaign
Outputs:
171 pieces of coverage featuring our campaign – including on high ranking outlets such as Yahoo! (DA 94), I-D (DA 93) and Evening Standard (DA 93).
Outcomes:
- 308 links from coverage
- 33 pieces of coverage featured on news outlets with a DA of 70+
- Global reach – coverage appearing in Gizmodo (DA 93), Inquirer (DA 89) and Nintendo Life (87).
- Average DA across all coverage was 54
Want to know what digital PR campaign we might do for you?
We’d love to hear from you, so get in touch!
Some more examples of digital PR campaigns with a strong gaming angle (you know we love these):
‘Video Game Tutoring’ for Tutor House