PORTAL

MCV Awards 2024 - Doodle Challenge

In short

We were thrilled to be nominated in the Creative Partner of the Year category at the 2024 MCV/DEVELOP Awards. This was Portal's first award nomination in its short lifetime, and it was an honour to be recognised as one of the games industry’s leading lights. We also sponsored this year’s awards to support an important event and to highlight the Portal brand. But us being us, we weren’t interested in any old branding exercise. We wanted to excite our fellow attendees, get them talking and contribute to their good time. In this case study, we’ll explore our unique take on event sponsorship, what we did and why we did it. Dive in.

Deliverables

A5 drawing competition

A5 word search

The idea

Engagement is at the heart of all our projects at Portal. Our top priority is getting people to notice and interact positively with our creative work. We usually do this on behalf of our partners, but in this situation we were our own client.

Engaging a room full of ‘well-refreshed’ industry peers presented a challenge. How could we get them to connect with Portal as a brand in a packed, noisy room when they’ve got other things on their mind?

Slapping our logo onto a pillar or big screen wouldn't be enough; that kind of thing is easily ignored. We wanted to find a fun, creative way to get people talking without overly intruding on their evening.

Our solution was simple but effective: a drawing competition. Everyone can pick up a pen and draw a little bit, and with a prize (a Steam Deck OLED) to give people an extra nudge, Portal’s Five Minute Doodle Off was born.

The execution

As the MCVs is a games industry event, we knew we had to tie the competition back to gaming. So we came up with the idea of asking people to draw their neighbour’s favourite video game character.

This served a dual purpose. It ticked the gaming box and encouraged those participating to speak to the person beside them. Tables are generally shared at awards dos, and there’s always a chance that you’ll be seated next to a stranger. Suddenly, our competition became the perfect icebreaker.

Our A5 leaflets and a Portal-branded pen were distributed to each table so no one could complain that they couldn’t participate. The instructions were easy to follow, and people were asked to email their handiwork to a dedicated Portal address we monitored throughout the evening.

Word search

As part of our event sponsorship, we were also able to take an advertising page in the official awards brochure. Rather than a straightforward page featuring our branding, we designed an interactive ad that would catch the eye and give attendees a reason to engage with what we do.

We put together a simple word search that listed each of our services and invited people to find them. No prize was offered, but we hoped that providing an unusual ad would encourage people actually to look at and absorb the content. At the very least, those attending would remember the Portal name.

The results

We took our seats at the awards and waited to see the results. We were slightly nervous. We were confident in the idea, but success is never guaranteed.

In the end, we needn’t have worried. It was clear in the first 10 minutes that the competition was the talk of the awards. We began receiving entries almost immediately, and by our deadline of 9.30pm, we had received over 200, giving our sponsorship activation an engagement rate of close to 40%—a triumph.

What was a surprise was the quality of those entries. Despite giving people just five minutes to finish their doodles, the artistic abilities of those in the room blew us away. The games industry knows how to doodle!

The tricky part was picking a winner. It was a close race, but ultimately, we opted for a superb Princess Peach, drawn by Cristina from Futurlab. Cristina’s Steam Deck was hand-delivered to her table just after the awards wrapped up. Congratulations to Cristina and everybody who took the time to enter; you were great.

Next year

The competition's success means we’re already looking ahead to next year’s awards. You can look forward to the Portal Doodle Off becoming a mainstay of the MCVs.

And that just about covers it. Marketing to any audience is difficult, especially when it’s a room full of your distracted peers. Our doodle-off shows that anything is possible with the right idea and execution.

If you have a project that would benefit from this kind of positive engagement, why not get in touch? We’d love to talk.