Palia: Elderwood Expansion Global Creative Campaign
To support the highly anticipated Elderwood Expansion for Palia, we launched a comprehensive global advertising campaign designed to capture attention, spark community excitement, and reach new audiences globally. ​​​​
Announce and Launch Trailers
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Development was coming in hot on The Elderwood Expansion, so I elected to create the trailer entirely using Unreal Engine's Sequencer. This way, the trailers could be made in-step with game development and shots could be re-rendered and easily adjusted for any changes. As this was our biggest marketing effort for Palia, the trailer had to appeal to new audiences as well as existing and lapsed players. So we needed to highlight The Elderwood - the newest Adventure Zone in the game - while also introducing all existing content to prospective players without boring the players that had been along for the whole ride.
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We also had the pleasure of revealing the expansion with PlayStation by exclusively unveiling it on their Blog and YouTube channel. ​​​
New Key Art for a New Direction
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Before Elderwood, Palia's identity was a bit muddled. The game casts a wide net, but it was difficult to determine target audiences without a fixed genre to sell it as. After much deliberation, I got allignment on selling Palia as a Fantasy Life-Sim Adventure. To accompany this, we needed to refresh our Key Art for the launch of the first expansion and Gen 9 Console release. I pushed for a community feeling with depth to sell the vastness of the game, while keeping it cozy and welcoming.
We were on an incredibly tight schedule to ship this piece, so I was very hands-on for our contracted artist by pulling in-game reference, creating characters and offering fast feedback to help him execute.
Global Performance Ad Campaign​
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A major pillar of our overall campaign was Paid Ads. However, beacuse Palia caters to a wide variety of players and players behaviors, we had to determine how to best sell a game with greatly different playstyles to a crowded genre. I ellected to create unique creative for a fleet of ads that focused on individual elements of the game rather than trying to show a smaller piece of everything. This helped us implement a Programmatic Multi-Touch Attribution strategy to give targetted potential players multiple views of Palia rather than a similar approach each time they received an ad.
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There was a lot of pressure to perform as this was our first paid campaign, and by the end of the it, we were seeing ROAS of over 230% and cost-per-conversion at $1.45.
Influencer Activations
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In tandem with our existing Palia Partnered Streamers, we activated a global paid streaming program, collaborating with key streamers and content creators to play and promote Palia. These content creators were selected to cast a wide net across the most popular streaming platforms.
Discord Quest​
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An opportunity emerged with Discord to create a Palia Themed Avatar Decoration, and while the execution time was short, it was something the team really wanted to pursue. I worked heavily with the artist on how to quickly create an animated decoration in-scope. We ended on this quick Chapaa Greeting, using our most iconic creature in a chibi style.
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Clearly the little guy proved irresistable, because in the week long quest, the decoration was activated over 110,000 times including 50,000 first time players.
Selling the Future​
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After our major beats concluded, we had to sell our players on Palia as a live service game. To do this, we started a new, recurring video series "Palia Path" to shed light on new features coming to Palia as far as a year out - something we hadn't committed to in the past. This video would also be the reveal of one of our most requested features since launch: Animal Husbandry.
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We ran this entirely on owned and earned channels, which helped engage our most active members. It also served as one of our most humanizing pieces of content, where we opened up about development difficulties to the community. I also made efforts to include multiple nods to our community to make the video have a more conversational tone, such as the nod to a money exploit from the elderwood launch, which is the most replayed portion of the video.
This campaign not only broadened Palia’s reach into new markets and platforms, but also established strong relationships with advertising and platform partners. The cohesive creative execution and data-driven targeting helped establish Elderwood as a defining moment in the ongoing growth of Palia. As a direct result of the campaign, daily active players increased by over 400%, marking the game’s most significant player growth since launch.
