Captain's Gold
- Brand
- Captain Morgan
- Year
- 2020
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Other
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Social
- Agency
- UNIT9
Objective
Captain Morgan wanted its December 2020 "Better Than Gold" push for Original Spiced Gold to live beyond a single UK TV spot, turning it into something audiences would actively spend time with. The aim was to strengthen the brand's standing with gamers while building reach and engagement on social during the key holiday season for rum.
Solution
The treasure hunt played out entirely inside Instagram, with a web of linked accounts standing in for a map. Players entered through a post on the brand's own feed, worked through a short tutorial carousel, then jumped between profile "locations" — an office, an abandoned mansion, an underground vault — by tapping tagged names in photos. Each profile's grid formed one continuous scene, with clues tucked into cropped shots and looping video, and carousels doubled as book pages or a spinning globe depending on the puzzle at hand. Solving a riddle revealed the next tag to follow, pulling players through all three stages of the heist; since the route wasn't linear, they could always backtrack to earlier locations for anything they'd missed before finally cracking the vault for the prize.
- 1
The player discovers the campaign inside Instagram itself, with no standalone website — it continues a TV spot called "Better Than Gold," and the studio built many different entry points across dozens of linked accounts and hundreds of posts.
- 2
The player's first stop is a tutorial post: swiping through its photo carousel reveals slides that explain the controls and what to do next.
- 3
Each location is an Instagram profile whose grid of images is stitched into one continuous scene, and the player taps individual tiles to examine it and uncover clues.
- 4
Some clues are deliberately hidden — cropped square so they only appear once a post is opened, or buried in a looping video where the key detail shows for only part of the loop.
- 5
The player moves between locations by opening a photo's tags and tapping a handle, treating tagged accounts as doors from one profile-room to the next.
- 6
Puzzles are solved through branching choices: a game interface is overlaid on the images, and tapping one of the tagged accounts sends the player down a correct or incorrect path.
- 7
Other puzzles are solved by paging through a post's carousel as if it were a physical object — flicking through book pages or spinning around a globe to reach the needed fragment.
- 8
The playthrough runs across three escalating locations: The Office, where the hunt for the "real gold" begins; The Mansion, an abandoned house explored with old-fashioned detective methods; and The Vault, the underground finale.
- 9
The network of accounts forms an open world rather than a fixed route, letting players roam freely between locations and backtrack to places where they missed something.
- 10
The session ends when the player uncovers the hidden treasure — something "#BetterThanGold" — with solved puzzles unlocking prizes along the way.
