A major global gaming publisher came to us with one of the most demanding briefs in the games industry: reintroduce a dormant franchise to a new generation of players across five European markets simultaneously, while maintaining credibility with the legacy audience that remembered the original.
Franchise relaunches in gaming are uniquely complex. The existing fanbase has long memories and high expectations — they need to feel the heritage is being honoured, not abandoned. At the same time, the commercial imperative requires reaching an entirely new audience of players who have no prior connection to the IP and need a compelling reason to engage.
The campaign needed to operate at genuine European scale — across English, French, Italian, German and Spanish-speaking markets — with channel execution spanning both digital and physical out-of-home environments, integrated into a single coherent campaign platform.
We planned and executed a fully integrated campaign across digital and out-of-home channels, with deployment and attribution infrastructure built to operate across the language and market boundaries of a pan-European release. The campaign reached gaming audiences at scale through targeted digital placements while OOH created physical presence in key gaming markets — the combination of screen and street that characterises major gaming launches.
The attribution infrastructure built for this campaign was a significant component of the engagement — tracking performance across five markets, multiple channels and distinct creative executions in a single unified reporting view. This gave the publisher's marketing team real-time visibility into where the campaign was performing across the European footprint, and allowed budget to be optimised toward the markets and channels delivering the strongest results.
Gaming audiences were targeted through a combination of behavioural and contextual signals — reaching players actively engaged with the category, on the platforms and in the environments where gaming content is consumed. The result was a campaign that felt native to gaming culture rather than an interruption of it.
The campaign delivered 154 million impressions across five European markets, reaching an audience of over 44 million gamers. The integration of digital and out-of-home channels created the kind of market presence that gaming franchise relaunches require — visible in the physical environments where the audience lives and works, as well as the digital environments where they consume gaming content.
The attribution infrastructure built for this campaign demonstrated the value of treating deployment and measurement as part of the creative brief rather than an afterthought. Having real-time cross-market reporting allowed the team to make informed optimisation decisions throughout the campaign window rather than waiting for post-campaign analysis.
This engagement demonstrates Simplicity's capability to operate at genuine European scale — planning, buying and deploying integrated campaigns across multiple markets, channels and languages from a single point of accountability.
Global Gaming Title · Digital & OOH · Pan-European
