RUNESCAPE3 MARKETING DESIGN
RuneScape 3 is Jagex’s flagship MMORPG, and its digital marketing runs all year round: always-on retargeting, seasonal events and major content launches. Working within Jagex Creative Services, I designed, animated and built the display advertising behind those campaigns, taking each one from the Digital Marketing team’s creative brief through layout, motion and HTML5 build to finished, trafficked banner sets.
Every brief defined an audience (lapsed players to win back, new players to recruit), a message of three to eight words that had to land within a few seconds, and an A/B test to learn from: animation against static, key art against in-game footage. The work below covers two of those campaigns: the launch of Archaeology, the game’s first new skill in four years, and the recurring Double XP events.
Services
Creative Services/Marketing Design, Motion Design, Digital DisplaysClient
Jagex, RuneScape 3ARCHAEOLOGY
Archaeology launched in March 2020 as RuneScape’s 28th skill. The brief called for HTML5 banner sets in seven sizes and four languages (EN, DE, FR, BR-PT), each taking a different angle on the launch: the skill itself (excavate artefacts, restore them, reap the rewards), the lore and dig-site locations behind it, and an interactive “scratch card” execution in which the player sweeps away sand to unearth a relic. Aimed at lapsed players and newcomers alike, the campaign also extended to a full site-takeover skin, with everything built from the launch key art and held to a 150 KB initial load.
DOUBLE XP
Double XP is RuneScape’s biggest recurring live event: for a limited time every skill trains at twice the speed, which makes it one of the strongest reasons for a lapsed player to log back in. For the February 2020 Double XP Weekend: Extended I built 300×600 HTML5 banners in A/B variants around in-game footage, with a player hammering at the anvil rendered as a looping sprite sequence, following the campaign learning that gameplay footage outperforms illustrated key art in display. Short, legible and urgent: the event lock-up, the action and a single call to action.
SOCIALIZER
Socializer was an always-on RuneScape banner set from spring 2019, aimed at one of the player types named in Jagex’s creative briefs: the Socialiser, who plays for the company as much as for the quest. Rather than a lone hero, the banners show a party of three adventurers charging across a sunlit island together, built from in-game character animation as a looping frame sequence and finished with the RuneScape logo and a single call to action. Designed, animated and built in three sizes: 300×600, 160×600 and 300×250.
