Fractal Family Feature: Ardacious & The Power of Video Advertising

Ardacious is a Brisbane-based software development startup founded by Dr. Ralf Muhlberger specialising in Augmented Reality — specifically in the spaces of education and games. Their flagship product is Ardent Roleplay, a smartphone application that brings popular tabletop roleplaying games Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu to life with customisable AR projections.

The Problem:

At the beginning of 2021, Ardent Roleplay's ads were struggling to drive engagement. Prospective leads weren't seeing the benefits and possibilities of Augmented Reality over the traditional physical miniatures they were already using. This struggle came down to a problem of positioning: a disconnect between how Ardacious saw their product and how prospects received it.

Upon further research, we determined a new ideal prospect: the Game Master. "The GM is core to how Ardent Roleplay operates because they're the storyteller," said founder Dr. Ralf Muhlberger. From a sales standpoint they're a great prospect, as if you hook one GM, you can hook between two and six more players.

The Solution:

To capture the imaginations of Game Masters, we needed to pivot from showcasing aesthetics to showing the storytelling potential of the software. We quickly determined that this could only be done through video.

The Ardacious team put together a 25 second clip of a small group of players looking at a medieval town that suddenly goes up in flames. Along with dramatic music and ad copy that replicates the Game Master's forms of addressing other players, this video immediately began firing the storytelling brains of the Game Masters we showed it to.

This video ad ultimately proved its worth. In the twelve months since implementing the first Meta campaign, it has generated 2,840 results and 758 leads across 25 campaigns. For a niche startup with a barrier-to-entry problem, a 26.6% conversion rate on Meta was a colossal leap.