To celebrate All Hallows’ Eve, Adobe hosted a little murder mystery challenge for Photoshop users on its Photoshop Facebook page. This case study looks at how the campaign resulted in over 4.8 million impressions and 22k Photoshop downloads of the game.
Adobe Photoshop: Murder Mystery Case Study (full edit) from Edelman West on Vimeo.
Case study summary
• Adobe wanted to boost brand sentiment for its flagship product, Photoshop.
• People were challenged to solve a case by cracking through layers of clues with the help of PS’s design tools.
• Part of the game was transferred to Facebook, which ignited an immediate conversation amongst the detectives.
• The campaign was interesting enough to get 22,000 downloads of a large 200MB file
• Campaign increased brand sentiment for Photoshop by 61%
The challenge
The task was to increase positive sentiment for Adobe’s Creative Cloud software.
Adobe wanted to boost brand sentiment for its flagship product, Photoshop. What better way, we thought, than to put Facebook fans’ skills to the ultimate test with an immersive game that asks: “Are you good enough at Photoshop to solve a murder?”
The solution
Photoshop fans received a real treat for Halloween: a murder mystery game inside a single Photoshop file. People were challenged to solve the case by cracking through layers of clues with the help of PS’s design tools.
Part of the game was transferred to Facebook, which ignited an immediate conversation amongst the detectives. Fans also shared original pieces of content based on their investigation materials.
The results
The campaign resulted in:
• Over 4.8 million impressions
• 22k Photoshop downloads of the game
• Positive sentiment increased from 15% to 76%.
Twenty-two thousand fans participated in the clue-like murder mystery, snooping through the many image layers for clues, and using Photoshop’s design tools as forensic ones.
By the time the murder was solved, the campaign had increased brand sentiment for Photoshop by 61%, netting a Facebook Award and two Cannes Lions in the process.
The jury’s comments: “Photoshop is already embedded in digital culture, and has been for years, but obviously it wants to stay that way amid changes to the digital world and its own distribution and pricing models. Photoshop contests abound on the web already so it’s great to see Adobe tapping into that and doing it in a pretty cool way: a murder mystery all hidden within a many-layered Photoshop file. Making something interesting enough to get 22,000 downloads of a 200MB file says it all. A really cool way to use the product as the medium. ‘Engagement’ is an overused word in marketing, but this campaign shows it does have real meaning too.”- Peter Roper, Editor at Marketing Mag Australia (Melbourne, Australia)
“I really loved the gamification aspect of this campaign and how it connects with the Photoshop experts, great idea and execution.” - Gamze Gurbuzatik, JWT International, Client Services Director (Istanbul, Turkey)
