The ANRcade
- Brand
- Estée Lauder
- Year
- 2020
- Objective
- Product Launch
- Industry
- Fashion & Beauty
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Makemepulse
- With
- Territory Studio
Objective
Estée Lauder needed to launch a reformulated Advanced Night Repair serum to a younger, digital-first audience without leaning on standard beauty advertising. An online arcade let the brand teach the product's benefits and its heritage since 1982 through play, reinforcing its Nighttime Skincare Expert positioning while a pandemic-era pop-up was off the table.
Solution
Landing on esteelauderanrcade.com, the player scrolls through a short origin story of the serum's little brown bottle before flying over a glowing night-time city and touching down inside a domed arcade. Circling the bottle are four lit-up portals, each opening a different mini-game — Repair Racer, Smooth Satisfaction, Serum Quest and Beauty Bounce — where the player races, taps, matches or bounces their way to a score, picking up bonuses and power-ups along the way. Between rounds they can spin the 3D bottle to inspect it up close, then jump back into another portal or share their score to social when a session ends.
- 1
Players open the site on a supported browser (an incompatible one is blocked with an update prompt) and begin a guided history of Advanced Night Repair starting in 1982.
- 2
Players swipe through the product's design eras, each rendered in the visual style of its decade, from neon to low-poly to augmented reality, with a small interaction unique to each period.
- 3
The tour ends with a reveal of the new Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex formula, followed by a 3D flythrough over a night city skyline.
- 4
The flythrough lands inside a domed stadium hub built around the new bottle, which players can view up close as a real-time 3D model, with four glowing portals leading to the games.
- 5
Repair Racer: players steer a rolling ball along a narrow track, collecting golden serum drops and points while dodging obstacles.
- 6
Smooth Satisfaction: players run an ASMR-style lab minigame, triggering rollers to smooth ribbons of serum in a whack-a-mole-like pattern on conveyor belts.
- 7
Serum Quest: in a retro arcade shooter, players use the bottle as a weapon to fend off environmental aggressors and collect golden serum drops while scrolling upward from city to space.
- 8
Beauty Bounce: players time jumps to bounce off a series of dropper tops climbing up the bottle, collecting golden bottles along the way.
- 9
All four games share points, power-ups, and bonuses, with sound design woven into the mechanics; points feed into in-experience challenges and rewards, and results can be shared to social media.
- 10
On regional markets, players reach the arcade through the Estée Lauder site and social channels, with local integrations (such as WeChat and Tmall in China) offering tied-in rewards like free samples and promotions.
