Xbox | 20th Century Fox: Crack the Code campaign

Fan focused preview screenings are a great way to win advocates and build that all important word of mouth buzz ahead of your release. But how do you ensure great attendance and avoid the high dropout associated with free events? 

Working with Xbox and 20th Century Fox I crafted a campaign to support a series of fan screenings for Alien: Covenant across the entirety of Australia. Blending gamification with a strong social initiative we achieved a massive 90% attendance. 

The campaign was based around managing an allocation of 1000 pairs of tickets across 5 Australian states for exclusive Alien: Covenant fan screenings and secure high attendance.

The campaign began by seeding 5 code segments across social media in the run up to launch. I then designed a registration hub housed on Xbox.com where participants could arrange the 5 code segments they’d found in the correct order to win their ticket.

Psychology

To maximise attendance the theory of ‘Effort Justification’ was used. Put simply; the harder someone has to work for something the more they value it.

Adding barriers to entry can be risky as they can affect participation, but in this instance research indicated that the exclusive screenings of Alien Covenant would be in high demand, so securing foot-fall would be easy.

Execution

A little psychology alone is not enough to deliver success. I crafted a carefully considered user journey to maximise retention and minimise frustration. With such an integral social campaign, frustration can easily boil over into a Twitter backlash. The experience needed to feel difficult to deliver a sense of value, but we needed to ensure we gave the right level of feedback to participants so they felt in control of the process.

I drew my inspiration from classic brain-teasers giving players just enough information to deduce the solution. On average it took people 6 attempts to crack the code, maximising retention while maintaining the sense of difficulty required to deliver perceived value.