The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
The Battle Cats 'hacked' itself to sell Cat Food on Black Friday
PONOS faked a hacker group stealing 100M Cat Food cans; players voted on the story with purchases, lifting revenue 131%.
PONOS (The Battle Cats)
The solution
The Battle Cats, PONOS's tower-defense game, has 90 million players but faced Black Friday — the most crowded advertising week of the year in the US. R/GA's brief was to captivate those players without shouting into the sale noise.
Instead of discounts, the team wrote a scandal into the game's lore: three characters rejected by the game 'hacked' PONOS, stole 100 million Cat Food cans (the in-game currency) and donated them to players, posting ransom-style videos on official channels. Players decoded the metadata in under 24 hours and found the real event: vote to get one of the OutCats into the game.
The vote was the commercial engine: players bought in-game items that doubled as votes for their favorite OutCat (Trash Cat won), surrounded by lost audition tapes, smear campaigns and influencers. The result was the best US campaign in the game's history: revenue up 131%, 900,000 new users and 1.1 million returning players.
Why it worked
- A story players could join beat a discount they'd ignore
- The vote monetized engagement instead of blocking it
- Official channels 'hacked' blurred fiction and reality
- Lore made the promotion feel like the game, not marketing
What can be applied
In a discount storm, sell participation: wrap the promotion in the product's own fiction, let purchases become votes, and the fans will make the campaign for you.
Aftermath
The OutCats won a D&AD 2024 Wood Pencil and two Clio Entertainment 2024 Silvers; PONOS reused the lore-playbook for its Lunar New Year petition campaign.
Sources
- The Battle Cats - 'The OutCats'
- 「にゃんこ大戦争」のプロモーション「The OutCats」が 世界的なアワード「Clio Entertainment 2024」の銀賞を受賞！
- PONOS' 'The Battle Cats' creates a petition to celebrate the Year of the Cat this CNY
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