Passion for Digital Innovation and Paris 2024 Run — Quentin Moreau-Defarges Interview
The success of Paris 2024 Run would not have been possible without the incredible teams at Beyond Digital, Gameloft’s first and only ad creative agency and part of Gameloft Advertising Solutions.
Its members have a long history with Gameloft and have worked hard to make this experience as engaging and memorable as possible. They are also behind many of the company’s innovative rich media solutions.
Quentin Moreau-Defarges is currently leading the agency from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. He has the chance to work with more than 100 digital experts everyday who put an incredible amount of passion into every project.
In order to learn more about the real life experience of working on Paris 2024 Run, I decided to sit down with Quentin and ask him some questions about the project and the process of producing interactive gaming experiences.
How did Paris 2024 Run successfully capture the two somewhat conflicting ideas of competition and interconnectedness that are a part of the Olympic Games?
That was actually something that came up very early during discussions about the concept.
We managed to reconcile the two principles through a counter appearing at the end of the game, summing up all the distances covered by all players.
Through this simple idea I think that is how we managed to reconcile that competitiveness on one side and Olympic values of friendship and participation on the other.
These kinds of mechanics are something we keep suggesting because we believe it can really drive people to participate and replay the game again and again. Not only to beat their own scores, but to make sure that they add to that common goal for everyone.
How was the impact and implementation of Paris 2024 Run different from other campaigns you have worked on?
As we mostly produce branded minigames to be enjoyed by the Gameloft community, throughout our different titles, adding an online browser version on top made the task more challenging for us.
I believe it was only our third project including the feature.
And obviously, the fact that we had such incredible visibility made the scale of this project much larger than before!
There was a really proactive cooperation between the Paris 2024 organization committee and us too.
By going with an endless runner, we were also sure to have the audience replay the game a lot and challenge their friends on a regular basis to reach the top of the leaderboard!
Where do you find inspiration in projects outside of your usual interests?
The excitement for this specific deal really came from the technical challenge, the visibility we were given with this minigame, and the fact it was for France’s candidacy to the Olympics.
We did not ever think our minigame would become a central piece of the communication around the event!
Let me also remind you that Beyond Digital is the first and only ad creative agency in Gameloft. We are blessed to produce minigames and other digital ad solutions for every country in the world.
Our producers are simply passionate to deal with different projects for various industries and cultures. For instance some of our members are big movie fans. So we obviously try to “maintain the flame” by assigning movie-related projects to them, because we know they will handle the project the best they can.
Apart from that, you can see Beyond Digital as a pure melting pot of talents, coming from different horizons and nationalities.
So whatever new and incredible brand comes our way with new challenges, everyone is ready to deal with it. Because we ensure everyone in our team remains curious about every topic.
Our inspiration does not only come from video games. It comes from all our passions and hobbies!
With the success of Paris 2024 Run, how do you think other campaigns could benefit from a similar engaging and interactive project?
We had some of our best engagement KPIs (people actually playing the game) ever with this campaign. Paris 2024 Run is a great example of how well our rich media campaigns perform.
There’s now a reason for clients to invest in media on similar branded minigames and generally speaking on advergaming. Paris 2024 Run is a great example not only of the minigames we are producing in Beyond Digital, but also more generally speaking of digital advertising. It is proof that this kind of format is really engaging and popular, and can really bring people together.
Finally, Paris 2024 Run allowed us to refine our whole framework and improve some processes internally.
It gave everyone in the agency the opportunity to improve how they take on a project with such a huge scale. Those kinds of improvements are all I can hope for from every deal we sign!
Make sure you read Paris 2024 Run: Gamification of an Olympic Bid as well:
