Back in 2014, around the time Candy Crush Soda Saga was released, King spent around $8 million on hot air balloons that never flew as part of the game’s marketing campaign.
This information comes from GDC and was provided by Angus Lovitt, co-founder of Kohort (a mobile game revenue forecasting company) and former VP of marketing at King. In a talk at GDC titled “You Can Waste Money on User Acquisition,” he revealed an interesting anecdote from King’s past.
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This talk – which I must stress is a serious and truly informative glimpse into the realities of video game marketing and its costs/pitfalls – begins with this light-hearted moment. King wanted to promote a follow-up to the popular Candy Crush Saga, so he turned to an advertising agency for ideas. Response; hot air balloon.
“I was like wow, this is amazing. Blade Runner is terrible,” Lovett said. Each balloon was sold for $1.3 million, to which Covert apparently responded: “I’ll take three, thank you.” During the presentation, Covert went on to show a photo of three hot air balloons parked on a pylon Inside, an advertisement for the balloon itself plays on a video screen.
This apparently proved to be a problem, as Covert noted that these screens required batteries to play ads, and since these batteries were too heavy for the balloon to carry, the balloon could never fly. After the speech, Lovett also explained that the annual cost of storing the balloons is $100,000 and the cost of destroying the balloons is $100,000.
Now, that may sound like a lot of money. That’s a lot of money! But Lovett also revealed that the money spent on this hot air balloon fiasco only accounted for 1% of King’s total game marketing budget. So, you know, no harm, no foul.
While that in itself was a fun little peek into the wild world of video game marketing, the talk itself delves into some interesting bits. Covert emphasized that user acquisition is important, but you shouldn’t always spend a lot of cash. Instead, invest in analytics (obviously, you want to hear this from an executive at a video game analytics company).
Covert also emphasized his disdain for not making agnostic spending, pausing spending to improve quarterly results and ensuring bonuses (in total). It’s very development-focused, and obviously a lot of it will probably be baseball-related, but if you’re even remotely interested in it, it’s worth checking it out in the GDC library (when it’s available).