AMAZON

TRIP AROUND THE BLOX

CONTEXT

Every year, the Amazon Holiday Toybook is mailed to over 30mm households across America, bringing with it the hopes and dreams of every toy-loving child in the nation. With over 650 unique toys featured, flipping through the catalogue has become an annual tradition for parents and children alike.

To give the toybok a bit of soul, we created a narrative about a Fox and their winter animal friends going on a road trip that served to help guide readers through the book. With the help of illustrator Lisk Feng, we created a quirky visual style for these animals and their shenanigans.

the brief

Given the current economic situation (2022), many households will not have expendable income to buy their children all the toys that they want. This means that the toybook may have a slightly less positive impact on the children reading it. I mean, who wants to flip through a book of awesome stuff that you can’t have? The challenge was: how can we find a creative way to bring joy and delight to children while also generating free press about the toybook?

our solve

For our solution, we found inspiration within the pages of the toybook itself. We noticed that Roblox was a featured product and wondered if we could possibly create a free-to-play virtual experience for our readers. The catch? We only had 40 days. Would that be enough time to create a fully fleshed out digital gaming experience that was PR-worthy?

the experience

When readers arrived on the Roblox page in the toybook, they scanned a QR code which took them to our Roblox experience within the Roblox platform. We named the experience, “Trip Around the Blox,” to reflect the road trip narrative built around our winter animal friends. Plus, putting an “X” in the title made us feel cool.

The experience would place players’ avatars at a camp site, where they could interact with the winter animals before competing with other players in a set of 4 free-for-all mini-games similar to those in Mario Party (which was the best game on N64 besides Super Smash Bros btw. Fifth grade me swears on this).

the mini games

Each of the 4 mini-games is based off of one of the winter animals. Players compete against one another to earn coins, badges, and of course, virtual street cred (which if you’re a kid is probably the most important of all)

hedgehog dash

Players are dropped onto a checkered platform where giant hedgehogs come barreling towards them at incredible speeds. Avoid getting hit; the last surviving player wins.

rockslide rally

Players must navigate an American Ninja Warrior style obstacle course, avoiding falling rocks, treacherous ice, spinning logs, and more. The player who finishes first (or finishes at all) wins.

owl says

Players are dropped onto a boardgame board featuring the faces of each animal on different tiles. Every time Owl calls out an animal, those associated tiles disappear, dropping players down into the lake. The last surviving player wins.

pack up

Similar to Capture the Flag, players must run around and retrieve items before bringing them back to their zone for points. Players can steal items from other players’ zones, making it ultra competitive.

IN-GAME PRIZES

By playing the games (and depending on how well their fair), players earn coins that they can then use to buy in-game prizes. These prizes are inspired by the road trip story once again, featuring items like animal masks, hats and bags that the animals wear in the book, and even a costume for their avatar that looks like a children’s version of the red car belonging to Fox.

profile badges

Certain actions and accomplishments achieved by players during the mini-games unlock badges for their Roblox profiles. They’re like boy scout badges, except instead of your fellow scouts staring at them in envy, it’s 30 million other players.

exclusive amazon “box head”

And for fun, we created one exclusive item that players could earn and apply to their avatars – to wear anywhere on the Roblox platform, not just in our Amazon experience.. which is a BIG deal. Why? Well, when players run around the Roblox platform wearing our branded Amazon box, it gets seen by millions and millions of other players worldwide which is free exposure. In face, most of the traffic to our experience came via virtual word of mouth when players saw the ridiculous box head on other players’ avatars and asked where and how they could get one too.

And the best part? Players could enter other branded experiences while wearing our box head. So yes, there were players wearing Amazon box heads running around the Wal-Mart experience which we technically didn’t premeditate but sure aren’t sorry about :)

results

• 1.5 Million unique visits in the first week alone with no paid media

• 350K users claimed our exclusive item (box head) in the first week alone

• Our experience earned a significantly higher user positivity rating than an official Roblox Brand Experience from a major competitor that launched that same week (not saying it’s Wal-Mart, but also not saying it isn’t).