Explore the strange.
Toca Boca is one of the most popular digital kids game design firms in the world. They create immersive, playful and non-competitive environments for kids to explore—and explore they do! One of the hallmarks of their approach has always been to bring a bit of whimsy and magic to everyday places, like the doctor’s office or the kitchen. What they had never done before was to take kids out of the everyday, and even into someplace a bit spooky.
That was the idea behind Mystery House, a weird and ghostly experience that allows kids to experiment and explore someplace completely unfamiliar to them. But, how to market such a concept?
Toca Boca, learning of my background as a creative storyteller and children’s book writer, brought me in to create their App Store description, microsite, and social media copy. They wanted something surprising, engaging and enticing for kids.
What I came up with was a story about the strange ‘Mystery House’ told from the first-person perspective of a kid who had snuck in. This was an approach that Toca Boca had never taken before and they fell in love with it, using the backbone of the idea across all of their marketing and digital content in the promotion of Mystery House.
This drove a lot of buzz and app downloads for the game design company, as the copious online reviews can attest.