Growing the International User Base for Party Poker

Challenge

Launched in August 2001, partypoker.com is one of the pioneers of the online poker industry.
The trusted brand wanted to grow its user base in 8 key markets: Germany, Brazil, Russia, Canada, UK, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The strategy was to take on their key competitor PokerStars in each of these key markets.

Planning

• An audience-based approach allowed us to understand exactly which media channels our young, male, upmarket target audience were consuming.
• Digital channels allowed us to gauge demand (ROI). We ran social, video and programmatic, the headline guaranteeing prizes greater than PokerStars.
• Brazil and the Nordics proved key markets. On this basis, we decided to run local TV to generate mass reach amongst our target audience.
• We used TV Squared to correlate TV spot times to web visits, enabling us to measure and optimise our TV buy in all 4 countries to improve efficiency.

Performance

The campaign hit a royal flush, especially in the four key identified markets. Smithfield managed the attribution and fed back recommendations to each market for them to execute locally.