TURNING AD BLOCKERS INTO AD LOVERS

TitleTURNING AD BLOCKERS INTO AD LOVERS
BrandTHE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
Product/ServiceRALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET
Category F03. Excellence in Media Execution
Entrant OMD Hamburg, GERMANY
Idea Creation TWITCH INTERACTIVE GERMANY Hamburg, GERMANY
Idea Creation 2 OMD Hamburg, GERMANY
Media Placement OMD Hamburg, GERMANY
Production TWITCH INTERACTIVE GERMANY Hamburg, GERMANY
Additional Company THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY Munich, GERMANY
Credits
Name Company Position
Adam Harris Twitch Director of Custom Solutions Europe
James Duffield Twitch Senior Creative Producer
Mario Hargina Twitch Account Manager
Felix Schütz Twitch Senior Creative Strategist
Julia Sabeike OMD Germany Senior Executive Activation Digital
Agata Frank OMD Germany Group Manager Activation Digital
Janina Rauch OMD Germany Group Manager Client Service & Digital Strategy
Anja Kluth OMD Germany Executive Client Service
Simone Reifferscheid OMD Germany Director Client Service

Why is this work relevant for Media?

By tapping into their passion for live streaming of videogames and finding a creatively fitting way to avoid ad blockers, we converted a target audience that rejects advertising into advertising fans. For the first time ever, we negotiated with Twitch to use one of their livestreams for an animated live placement: Together, we staged the main characters of Disney’s movie "Ralph Breaks the Internet", disrupting and “breaking” a live experience. The viewers loved this entertaining advertising so much, they celebrated the characters every time they crashed the stream and shared the message for the upcoming cinematic release outside of Twitch.

Background

Young people love entertainment and are willing to pay for great content. And they still love movies. But their entertainment consumption is geared more and more towards digital channels. This means we need to work extra hard to convince them that a trip out of their digital world into a real cinema is worth it. Usually a trailer ad or sneak peek for an upcoming movie would do the job to tease the promise. But here’s the bad news: our young target audience is becoming unreachable with video content through traditional offline advertising ‒ and even digitally they are either using advertising-free streaming services or ad blockers to avoid the one thing we need to get to them: advertisement for our movie.

Describe the creative idea / insights (30% of vote)

In the animated movie "Ralph Breaks the Internet", two friends accidentally travel to the place called "The Internet" for the first time and, due to their clumsiness's they cause a lot of chaos. We combined these characteristics with our challenge to bypass ad-blockers: To let our young audience experience these chaotic effects firsthand, we featured the characters natively in the only place our target audience would not block out ‒ together we integrated the characters into one of Twitch’s popular livestreams and let them mess it up!

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

The reason for a placement on Twitch was simple: Despite streaming movies and series, our target audience has another passion point that is becoming even more relevant: online gaming. And they love live video streams, where their idols are playing their favorite video games online. In recent years, Twitch has become the go-to-platform for those live streams ‒ the ideal platform to engage and woo our young audience. Given, we find a way to avoid ad-blockers to let our creative idea be the entertaining experience that conveys what the movie is all about.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

Together with of one of Germany's gaming idols, Lara Loft, we turned her Twitch stream into the playground of Ralph and his friend Vanellope for a live disruption. It all happened right in front of the eyes of the audience: the animated characters repeatedly "crashed" Lara's live stream, messing around with her profile, browsing through her hard drive and starting some of Lara's video files, including the trailer of the movie. Ralph also altered Lara’s alert jingle (the sound playing whenever new fans subscribe to Lara’s channel or donate her money, a paid interaction supported by the platform itself) to a Rick Astley smash hit. Fans flocked to the live stream and marveled at the stunt, paying their tributes to get “rickrolled” again and again: We brought the unreachable, ad-blocking generation to voluntarily pay a financial contribution to a streamer, only because it was entertaining for them.

List the results (30% of vote)

The Twitch-Chat comments during the Ralph disruption were overwhelmingly positive (69%), some neutral (27%) and negative comments were very few and negligible (4%). Pretty good for an audience that usually blocks out advertising, right? 10% of these users even turned themselves into Ralph-ambassadors and promoted the action spontaneously outside of Twitch by calling their friends to vote for who they liked better - Ralph or their gaming idol Lara. This seamless integration of the movie characters and trailer worked, drawing more viewers to the livestream: At the stream's peak, Lars's concurrent live viewership was 160% higher than her average concurrent viewership.