To promote a loyalty program, Accor leveraged a partnership with DJ Snake to create an updated version of a popular French video game, with gameplay elements referencing the hotels and the DJ.
Objective:
Accor S.A. is a French company that owns, manages, and franchises hotels, resorts, and vacation properties. It is the largest hospitality company in Europe, and the sixth largest worldwide. Accor offers a loyalty program called Accor Live Limitless that rewards its clients every day with exclusive discounts, offers, experiences and benefits. The brand needed new members to sign up for its loyalty program and wanted to leverage its partnership with DJ Snake to do so.
William Sami Étienne Grigahcine, also known as DJ Snake, is an internationally well-known French Algerian DJ and brand ambassador for Accor Hotels. At that time, DJ Snake was returning to Paris for an exceptional concert at the Parc des Princes on June 11th, the stadium of his childhood.
Target Audience:
The target audience was between 18-30 years old. It consisted of young people who love old music and who know how to appreciate the magic of retro things.
Creative Strategy:
Having a partnership with the artist, the brand knew that it would not be very difficult to get some extra tickets for his concert. Giving them away in a raffle would have been easy, but also of little significance to the target audience.
The brand would update the popular French mobile game Snake to give fans the opportunity to win the last tickets of DJ Snake's concert. The media strategy was entirely based on social media. The brand used its Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok accounts to promote the game.
Context:
The videogame was literally a "game-changing" strategy for Accor Hotels, which was previously familiar with traditional campaigns for rewarding its fans with new experiences. The brand changed the narrative and took Accor to the next level.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Videogames are one of the most interactive medias. They are playful by nature, and fans are way more engaged by playing with it rather than watching a classical ad.
Mobile Execution:
The brand launched the campaign on June 1, 10 days before the concert. In the aesthetics of an 8-bit game, a snake had to swallow gameplay elements referring to Accor and the DJ: vinyl records, travelers' suitcases, cocktails, sunglasses, etc. Depending on their score, fans got limitless experiences rewards. The players who established the highest scores among all participants could win VIP tickets, including a meeting with the artist at the Accor Molitor five-star luxury hotel on the day following the concert.
Other players who performed well could get regular tickets for the show, a dinner at the Molitor hotel, and so on. The brand also selected four influencers to connect with the target audience in a more meaningful way. These influencers were all French influencers meaningful to the target. They were all music fans, lifestyle and travel buffs, which fit perfectly with the persona of DJ Snake fans. These influencers shared the game and contest on social media, and with more than 100,000 followers each, the brand believed it could make an impact.
The brand asked DJ Snake to share the URL of the game on his social media channels. He did it on Twitter with a retweet. Thanks to this, the brand had thousands of new visitors to the site and got some earned media from musical and traditional media.
Before the campaign with DJ Snake, Accor needed more members to join its loyalty program. But as a hospitality company, with a rather traditional line of communication, doing something cool, integrating DJ Snake and making it meaningful to the fans was not going to be easy.
One of the KPIs was the exposure of the partnership. Accor also wanted people to live an experience with the brand.
The campaign achieved the following results:
Instead of using traditional paid media to inform fans they could win tickets for DJ Snake's concert, the brand used the power of games to create engagement with the target group.
The game became the face of the campaign, as fans played it and loved it. Accor shared it with journalists in France to spread the world in mainstream media. Thanks to the connection with DJ Snake fans, the campaign got earned media from main French TV channels such as M6, and even had the story featured on news programs.
Moreover, to make this game viral, the strategy was to make the user the strongest communication medium. Thousands of players shared their scores on social media sharing their screens and becoming spokespersons for all. Gamification, the very essence of this activation, allowed the brand to keep all the players on the edge of their seats and to attract new ones.
