After more than 100 days in quarantine and thousands of branded messages inviting people to “get through this together”, consumers started to demand a different approach in the way companies addressed the issue of the pandemic.

Experts in avoiding traditional advertising and generally skeptical about brand intentions, Argentinian centennials are not keen on giving their attention away.

They need proof of real value being added and are particularly cruel on social media when a company fails to do so.

Knowing that, and that a lot of birthday parties were regularly pushed back or cancelled altogether by the successive extension of the lockdown period, our objective was more than just reaching the audience. We needed to provide a real alternative and to build relevance for people at home whilst being a brand that is experienced at its full on the streets.

In order to connect with our quarantined audience in an unmistakable Tuenti-way we needed them to take an active part. Tuenti is all about the shared experience with others and to achieve such thing, we had to go beyond the patronizing role of an advertiser.

This is why we entered the virtual world of Fortnite to invite centennials to join us in a collective celebration for all the postponed, cancelled or (even worse) Zoom-held birthdays that fell victim to the lockdown measures.

Everyone was welcome at the virtual club and our Discord server to participate in games and activities for numerous prices, but for those who preferred to watch, there was also an official stream on Twitch with a well-known streamer.

Being a digital telco company, this new -more digital than ever- reality suited us better than most competitors and with the help of social listening and some human experience of our own, we were quick to realize that centennials were missing the real-time interaction with their friends.

Fortnite offers the possibility to generate a game session in which participants

aren´t forced to follow the rules. So, instead of players eliminating each other we made a better use of the server by throwing a huge party, hosted by a streamer (which in turn was one of our communication channels) with lots of presents and thousands of gamers playing on cellphones, computers, Playstation and Xbox.

On July 6, 2020 we organically announced on our social media accounts that we were going to kick off the national holiday of the 9th with a special birthday party and that everyone was invited to participate.

Throughout the following days we carried on releasing bits of information about this party until the day of the event came and alongside BoffeGP (streamer) and Peek Studios the complete announcement was released: Join us tonight, alone or with friends, on Playstation or Xbox, on a computer or cellphone. We are going to celebrate the Uncanceled Birthdays!

And from 6 P.M. to well into the night, lots of gamers and their friends joined the party in the server, chatted via Discord and enjoyed the show on Twitch.

Throughout the 4 hours that the main event lasted, we streamed and partied with thousands of gamers in the club and were joined by more than 2 million of their friends on Twitch and Discord.

Our guests posted about our party on their social media and it soon went viral, having more than 7 million impressions and showing how birthdays should be celebrated in pandemic times.