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R/GA, Marketing Agency

PONOS THE BATTLE CATS THE OUTCATS

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PONOS' The Battle Cats is a very weird game, with 90 million very engaged players. So when PONOS asked us to captivate their US fans during Black Friday, one of the busiest advertising seasons of the year, we decided to shift from the usual video game playbook. Instead of offering fans expected Black Friday Deals on the game’s built-in currency, 
we opted to give them a scandal.


  • Campaign Creation

  • Influencer Strategy

  • Brand Positioning

  • Asset Creation

  • Media Planning

131%

Revenue increase

900K

New user acquisition

1.1M

Returning users

“This Black Friday CP marked a significant milestone as a new initiative for our company from creative point of view. We are always thrilled to work on promotional campaigns with RGA. The response from users has been overwhelmingly positive, leading to a substantial increase in app installations. This campaign not only enhanced our visibility but also resulted in notable improvements in our in-app KPIs, including user engagement and retention rates.”

Seiichiro Sano Managing Director

We orchestrated a hack, aligned with the game’s lore and narrative, to grab our fans’ attention: a team of three rejected Cats that never made it into the game, the OutCats, sought revenge by stealing 100 Million Cat Food cans (the in-game currency) and randomly donating them to users.

Released in a ransom-style video, these spurned Cats demanded to be included into the game. And players ate it up hacking the metadata in less than 24 hours to uncover the promotion: vote to get one of them into the game.


We then released the lost auditions of the three Cats and, with the help of a squad of influencers who fueled the conversation, fans started taking sides. We even ran smear campaigns to encourage a lot of voting (and buying).

The campaign's centerpiece was a voting mechanism allowing players to influence the game's storyline by purchasing in-game items that doubled as votes for their favorite OutCat, which turned out to be Trash Cat.

This innovative approach led to the best US campaign in the game's history, driving revenue and deepening player engagement by making them active participants in the game's evolving narrative.

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