Muhammad Ali played it. The Beatles played it. Queen Elizabeth banned it. You yourself have probably let the game take you over before flipping the board and stomping away.

Despite being a global icon with 99% brand recognition, Monopoly had been coasting on nostalgia — which wasn’t convincing people to purchase.

To get people to buy more games, Monopoly needed to break out of the confines of nostalgia to show its relevance today and prove that the brand could mean more than just one product.

To do that, we chose to recast the brand through a universal but unspoken truth about Monopoly: it transforms anyone who plays into a ruthless villain who will do whatever it takes to win — even when winning requires bankrupting your pregnant mother.

In this film, we follow a sweet-looking Nai Nai working her shift as a banker at the Community Chest Bank. As her first customer deposits cash, we see her sneakily stuff the cash into her jacket. This begins a cash-stealing frenzy for her. We cut between different customers and Nai Nai’s kind smiles as she continues stealing from them. Finally, a little boy smiles up at Nai Nai, sliding a single dollar across the counter. She adds his dollar to her stack, showing off her “moneyyyy” to the audience. We match cut, revealing that Nai Nai doesn’t actually work in a bank but is playing the banker in Monopoly. Her family, who we saw play different roles in the bank, sits around the gameboard — oblivious to the fact that she’s actively stealing. She smirks to herself, because All is Fair in Monopoly.

This campaign was the first step in reviving a 90-year-old brand, beginning a repositioning effort that will set the stage for the next decade of Monopoly’s business and beyond. In creative testing, the film work directly led to positive shifts in brand purchase drivers, like “Has games my friends like” (+12%), “Brings out my core competitor” (+11%) and “Lets me engage in fun mischief” (+11%). It also shifted perception of overall brand attributes like “Cool” (+15), “Thrilling” (14%), and “Mischievous” (+28%).