Arcade1Up
The nostalgia for the 80’s hit the ground when Stranger Things was released in North America in 2016. A year after, the company Tastemakers begin a journey to bring the Arcade experience to peoples’ living rooms.
The big challenge was: In a world of unlimited downloads, how to make appealing a console that has a limited amount of games.
The proposed plan included a 360 strategy that featured the Arcades in TV, printed and digital ads across relevant websites, etc. For the purpose of this post I’ll focus on one of the most rewarding pieces my team and I produced.
We had the task to come up with an original concept that represented the nostalgia of the Arcades in an unexpected way.
I knew it would be printed as a single page spread on Walmart’s Game Center magazine.
As the in-house studio for Tastemakers we did not have any external budget to produce this idea. As the creative lead for the project, I knew we had to take the outmost advantage of our tools, equipment and skills to create this ad.
After the brainstorming session my team solidified a plan to use the shadows of the emblematic characters to tell the story.
Paper, scissors and an iPhone’s flashlight was all we needed to project the stencils onto the seamless paper.
To photograph the arcade, I made sure that the lighting and angle matched the mock-up approved by the PR team.
Below is the first version presented to the internal marketing team →
Below is the final ad as printed on the magazine →
The client liked the result so much we repeated the process for the Mortal Kombat arcade.
The combined efforts of the digital campaigns and the printed ads resulted in over 1.2 Billion impressions and contributed to them overachieving sales targets by 100% 👌.