Garena Free Fire
A new battle royale has arrived
North American game launch
Paid media, influencer marketing, brand partnerships and content creation.
Ask any American gamer what the most popular battle royale game is in the world, and a few years ago, the answer may have surprised them. While Fortnite dominated consoles across the U.S., a much more popular game had captured the attention of mobile gamers globally: Garena’s Free Fire.
Garena tapped Lemonade to show American gamers what 450 million players around the world had already discovered: Free Fire is a mobile game you can’t put down. So, how do you get a relatively obscure mobile battle royale game in front of a national audience that already loves Fortnite?
Audits and insights
The key was understanding gaming audiences, which began with a comprehensive audit of the battle royale genre: Its heavy user group, its appeal to casual players, its stadium-packed esports tourneys and its hundreds of live-streaming Twitch channels.
Our key takeaways brought into focus a number of advantages Free Fire had over Fortnite, and how we could shape those advantages into a strategy that would recruit casual and console gamers, alike.
The four major Free Fire advantages that informed this strategy
It’s easy to engage: With each game lasting around 10 minutes, it’s perfect for casual gamers, and for heavy console gamers who are on the go.
Impressive mobile gameplay: The game was made natively on mobile, which optimized gameplay for a variety of phones and solved bandwidth issues experienced by more graphic-intensive titles.
Character customizations: Our research uncovered that younger gamers value self-expression through character customizations. Free Fire’s heavy customization options allow users to do just that.
Global community: It was important to communicate the scope of Free Fire’s global popularity; that players in the U.S. could tap into this massive, world-wide community of gamers.
Backed by a mountain of insights, our next step was communicating Free Fire’s advantages as key differentiators via a robust education and awareness campaign that spanned bite-sized gameplay content all the way to big-name celebrity partnerships.
How-To Videos: We captured vast amounts of game footage with Unreal Engine—along with some great influencers and partners who knew the game inside and out—and used that footage to tell stories, offer tips and tricks.
Established Free Fire HQ: We built a website for game updates, player awards and shout-outs, and ultimately handed this over to the community to be run by loyal fans instead of the brand.
Fandom Content: After auditing social media audiences and determining YouTube as Free Fire’s most effective platform, we developed content optimized for YouTube, including weekly shows where Free Fire characters provided updates, localized for each region, and more.
Education and awareness
In order to drive fast Free Fire adoption, and remove any friction, our first goal was to educate audiences how to play. User acquisition is a lot easier when audiences are primed. So, to accomplish this, we drew up a strategy that hit multiple touchpoints and messages.
Now that we’d laid a foundation of education and the framework to build a community of Free Fire players in the U.S., our next step was user acquisition.
Our goal was to build new user bases, grow social channels and overall awareness. This was accomplished through a strategy of awareness and conversion-based advertising.
To begin, we immediately refreshed all of the game's trailers, creating at least 30 versions of the main Free Fire trailer in order to run extensive tests with paid media. We also put Free Fire’s key differentiators into play, building messaging around the global community and the ease of engagement.
Through a foundation backed by our comprehensive audits, our paid media campaign reached an 80 million DAU goal and nailed every aggressive CPI target that Garean set.
Influencer and integrations
When you execute well, things can end up going your way. In this case, with paid media now running strong, Free Fire got an opportunity no one could have planned for: Fortnite was booted from Apple’s App Store.
Based on the success we had experienced with our paid media campaign, Free Fire was positioned at the top of app store charts when news hit. As the saying goes, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
This presented a huge opportunity, so we built a campaign to match. To do this, we targeted a short-list of partnerships that would boost Free Fire’s exposure and drive adoption. Enter, Netflix.
Piggybacking on the global promotion for Netflix’s “Money Heist,” we partnered with the global streamer to create a Free Fire tournament and Digital Treasure Hunt activation inspired by the show, emulating the bank robbing characters and drawing clear visual and emotional parallels for fans of both the series and the game. The tournament was in-game, immersive and tied to a social media giveaway that awarded $25k in actual gold.
To promote the treasure hunt, we assembled an army of celebrity gaming influencers that included Felicia Day and the Guild, Jason Mewes, FaZe Clan and more.
Playing up the vigilante narrative of the “Money Heist” show, fans were asked to participate in a digital heist to win real gold bullion bars that were reported to be stolen from a corrupt authoritarian government. This narrative aligned with the central themes of the battle royale genre, and users learned more about the game lore as they participated in the heist.
Our creative team designed videos for each of the influencers that would appear as though they’re getting hacked mid-stream. Ultimately, influencers calling on their fans to join the hunt, exponentially expanded our pool of participants and viewers. This was picked up by significant gaming press and had a massive 10% impact on downloads for that period.
With community and awareness on the rise—as well as Free Fire app downloads—we decided the brand was ready to support celebrity ambassadors and strategic brand partnerships with a goal of creating a “halo effect” of cultural relevance for Free Fire. Successful activations included partnerships with Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg, and Christiano Renaldo.
The results? Bigger than expected.
Garena has been an amazing partner throughout this journey, and as a result of our collaborative efforts, this happened:
Free Fire became the #1 game in the world (3 years in a row!)
Over 1 billion app downloads on Google Play Store alone
Over 70 billion views on YouTube content
Awarded “Esports Mobile Game of the Year 2021”
To learn more about Lemonade’s full-service advertising agency capabilities, visit our Services Page.
