Acer Predator

Challenge

Working in collaboration with the McCann Seoul & London creative teams, Acer wanted to evolve their current ‘It Lies Within’ global marketing campaign with a new interactive experience. The campaign tells the story of Kya, a young girl who's trying to find her place in the world and learning to embrace the extraordinary power that lies within her. At the same time, the series celebrates the power and innovation that lies within every Predator machine and peripheral.

The destination experience needed to be a digital hideout, where Kya and her friends could find safe harbour and launch into different missions. The creative teams wanted to emulate the “point-and-click” adventures games of the early 90’s, where gamers could discover products and unlock achievements.

As a global campaign, the solution would need to be localised to support 53 regions and 25 languages. Adding complexity to the campaign, the hideout needed to be hosted on Acers global website, which due to security restrictions only allowed static HTML – no databases or API connectivity.

Solution

Starting from the proposed concept, I created a series of user experience wireframes which were turned into interactive prototypes. This allowed the creative and client teams to explore and play with the hideout, quickly providing feedback on how interactions would work, product content would be explored, and the collectables would be discovered. This iteratively process ensured the final experience aligned with the creative vision while optimising the user flow and discoverability.

The hideout needed to balance discoverability with ease of use, allowing products to be easily accessed whilst remaining true to the original concept. It consisted of a scrollable environment, that allowed gamers to interactive with objects and content placed throughout. Different categories of objects would have different functions, for example:

• Products: laptops, computers, peripherals, etc, would open content takeovers, allowing gamers to explore the range of newly launched products and buy or discover more on their local Acer platform.
• Campaign objects: posters, displays, loot boxes, etc, would open campaign content takeovers, providing story videos, downloadable assets, eSports sponsorships or social feeds
• Hidden collectables: game and gamer related objects such as crowbars, power drinks and toys would open a content modal. Six specific objects could be collected in a stache, allowing the gamer to unlock specific regional rewards.

Working within the technology constrains the solution was built using a static-site generator. This approach allowed for a single set of a templates to developed and then compiled out into 58 regional websites. The content for each of the different sites was managed through individual JSON files, which stored all copy, product information and localised marketing data.

This approach not only met the restrict security requirements setout by Acer, but also ensured rapid deployments, high performance and simplified content updates across all regions.

The solution was delivered to Acer’s IT team, who launched the hideout globally in tandem with the announcement of the new products at CES 2023.

Impact

The hideout was live for just a year but made a big impact. It was nominated for and won two Webby Awards in the “Website & Mobile Sites Entertainment 2023” category, including Peoples Voice Winner, beating the likes of Apple, Marvel and Variety. And a Red-Dot award for “Brand & Communication Design”.