CASE STUDY: How Poca brought EPL trading cards online in Vietnam

Background

In 2011, Pepsico’s snack brand, Poca, used a trading-card game to leverage consumer interest in the English Premiere League (EPL) to boost sales of its potato chip snack. In anticipation of the start of the EPL competition, millions of Poca chip bags were sold with trading cards inside. The trading cards featured up to 68 footballers complete with real-life stats.

Aim

In 2012 Poca wanted an innovative way to bring its EPL trading-card game to life, driving it from in-store/offline into the digital space to enhance the brand experience and ultimately drive sales.

Execution

Sofresh helped Poca to gamify trading cards—using the offline purchasing/collecting/trading behaviour of card collectors to leverage an online digital experience.

The agency launched Poca Match Attax Tournament, a real-time, turn-based multiplayer card game, on the brand's website. Users could collect the cards and use the players on the cards to form a football team on the website, where they could trade or buy more cards to perfect their teams.

By playing a match right away to stack up points, the user on top of the leaderboard every week won a PSP. Users could also collect special-edition "3D cards" in select packs to win a PS3 and a Pro-Evolution Soccer game on disc.

The website offered an opportunity for players to directly connect with each other in real-time and engage in a turn-based soccer game.

Results

In March 2012, one month into the campaign, the Poca potato chip snack set a new sales volume record (up 168 per cent from 2011 and up 400 per cent from January 2012).

By the end of the four-month campaign (February through June 2012), the product was out of stock everywhere due to the high demand.

With zero media buy and no social-media spend, the Poca site set an all-time traffic record of over 4.5 million page views, 620,000 visitors and 25,000 unique players with an average time on site of 5 minutes.