‘Older boys’ are at the front line of the blurring of offline and online, the virtual and the real world; through new digital media. To ensure we were tapping in to this and giving them something genuinely exciting, we created a UK media first.We ran an In-Game scavenger hunt in the game Splinter Cell. Whilst players moved throughout the game they would see an ad asking them to follow the signs to collect the clues. Each subsequent sign would be a letter spelling out NERF in sequence. Once they had found all four letters the next ad served gave them a number to text to win a blaster, bringing the virtual play through to the real world.In addition to this we ran in-game display advertising across Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, running in 55 of the biggest ‘competitive’ titles available at the time.

This was the first time that any toy manufacturer had used In-game in the UK and investing such a large proportion of the budget in it was bold. The results however, speak for themselves.Research showed that brand awareness increase by 18% whilst purchase intent increased by 30%.Crucially though we delivered on sales. We smashed the target of doubling sales; by the end of 2010, sales of Nerf had more than tripled.