Agency (Ad)venture
View the case- Brand
- Snapchat
- Year
- 2023
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Tech & Telecom
- Mechanic
- Mini-Games
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Daniel J Diggle
Objective
Snap wanted to win back agency mindshare after the pandemic had emptied out its roadshow circuit — and to do it while ad dollars kept drifting to YouTube and Instagram. Rather than pitch senior buyers with another slide deck, it built something the day-to-day teams across every discipline at an agency would actually want to play.
Solution
You start by picking your real agency, naming your pixel avatar and choosing an industry brief — Beauty, CPG, a D2C app, Financial Services or Retail. From there you're dropped into a 16-bit ad-agency office, walking the halls with the arrow keys and hitting space to chat with co-workers who crack agency in-jokes and let you try tools like the My AI chatbot on the spot. A phone icon opens the map to four mini-games — Brief Sprint, Brainstorm, Deck Build and Big Pitch — that walk you through a real pitch process one stage at a time, each one scored and each unlocking a downloadable strategy PDF for your chosen vertical. Finish the run and your score lands on a leaderboard where your agency competes against every other agency that's played, with hidden extras — an AR bonus round, a launch Lens — for anyone who goes looking.
- 1
The player opens the browser-based Agency (Ad)venture and lands on a 16-bit arcade-style title screen.
- 2
The player picks which Snap partner agency they work for, tying their eventual score to that agency's leaderboard entry. They then create a character by typing a name and choosing a pixel avatar, and select a brief from five industry categories — Financial Services, Beauty, Retail, D2C Service, and CPG — a choice that determines which mini-challenges and takeaways follow.
- 3
The player explores a top-down pixel-art agency office as a new business coordinator on their first day, walking around with the arrow keys. Approaching a co-worker and pressing the spacebar opens a dialogue full of agency in-jokes and explanations of Snap ad products.
- 4
Some of these conversations introduce Snapchat's in-app tools, such as the My AI chatbot, which the player can try out directly inside the game rather than just read about.
- 5
A phone-menu button in the bottom-right corner lets the player jump between areas of the experience instead of walking the whole office.
- 6
Four mini-games punctuate the day, each mirroring a stage of a real pitch: an endless-runner dash to collect the brief from the strategy team, a whack-a-mole round catching good ideas while dodging tangents in a brainstorm, a memory game spotting duplicate slides during deck QA, and a rhythm game hitting the beats of the final pitch.
- 7
Each mini-game is scored on its own, and the scores combine into a total for the run that is posted to a leaderboard ranking the player's agency against the other partner agencies.
- 8
Alongside the games, the player can download a strategy document with templates and real advertising tips for the vertical they picked, so the takeaways leave the game with them.
- 9
Wandering off the main path uncovers easter eggs hidden around the office, including extra rooms like a yoga room and an augmented-reality bonus game.
- 10
At Snapchat's in-person roadshow stops, the same game also ran standing up on two custom arcade cabinets, displayed next to 3D models of the in-game characters.
