Gaming is a very tough and competitive industry for brands with an audience that is extremely selective. The way forward is to find creative ways to reach through to them that isn't considered as advertising or paid for. With our limited resources and budget, we aimed to create awareness and activation online around Lenovo’s gaming equipment ‘Legion’ on our market, true to the brand values “Different is better”. The target audience was young gamers 18-30 yrs.

Lenovo believes that different is better. This is our concept and it means we make advertising different too. So to promote their new line of gaming products, it was natural to look for unexplored routes. The target audience (young gamers) prefers reviews and recommendations before traditional product advertising, so we thought why not make entertainment out of reviews?

Our way of different was to use the reviews and have a metal band record six new songs with honest lyrics about premium Lenovo products. The songs became heavy metal videos with product placements. And as it turned out, heavy-metal-product-review-videos got a warm welcome.

With Lenovo's brand promise ”Different is better” in the back of our head we went all in on product reviews when creating this PR-driven activation.

Our strategy was to reach young gamers on the sites where they look for information with content that stands out from anything they're used to seeing. And with that share it with their like minds. That meant we had to create something that would have the cunningness in order to end up on the tech-sites in the first place.

We started out by asking for some of the most popular tech journalists permission to use their Lenovo-reviews in our ads. With their blessing we then recorded a full album of aggressive metal songs with honest lyrics borrowed straight from the reviews. The songs were then presented with music videos where product placement and metal mayhem strangely took place side by side. We then sent it all back to the reviewers and later aired them on Lenovo's social media channels and via Twitch and YouTube.

Videos were sent to ManofMany.com, Mobil.se and The Verge. Shared voluntarily. Also through Lenovo Sweden’s social media channels.

Isolated results measured in this campaign:

Media reach 162 million

Earned media 1,3 million

+ 100 articles (mostly connected to a gaming audience)

Metal Reviews is part of our 'Different is better' concept, which, throughout the last fours years, have taken Lenovo Legion from an unknown gaming brand in the Nordics to market leader in both Desktop and Laptop. Market share Sweden: 32% and 32%, Finland: 16% and 26,5%