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. With Ardent Roleplay, gamers can become more immersed in their favourite tabletop games and discover new ways to enjoy those games together. Ardent Roleplay’s primary audience is males aged 18-44 with an interest in tabletop gaming and/or cutting-edge technology.

Ardent Roleplay was the first app of its kind, with competitors only just last year beginning to emerge 3 years after Ardacious first released their software to market. Ardacious has been working alongside Fractal since the early days, and together we’ve helped Ardent Roleplay jump a number of hurdles.

The Problem: 

At the beginning of 2021, Ardent Roleplay’s ads were struggling to drive engagement. Through our analysis, we found that prospective leads weren’t seeing the benefits and possibilities of Augmented Reality over the traditional physical miniatures they were already using and had invested time and money into. Most players also already used their smart devices for other gameplay needs, like tracking characters or taking notes. This struggle came down to a problem of positioning: a disconnect between how Ardacious saw their product and how prospects received it that was rooted in a misconception on our end of what the ideal prospect was looking for.

In the initial stages, an ideal prospect for Ardent was just anyone who enjoyed tabletop roleplaying. This was unfocused, and didn’t capitalise on what really set Ardent Roleplay apart from competitors. As a companion product to a separately-owned game, Ardent Roleplay faced a much higher barrier to entry from prospects’ decision paralysis in a crowded market of digital options for a physical game. A player can only use so many apps at once, and we had to show them why Ardent Roleplay should be their choice.

Upon further research, we determined a new ideal prospect: the Game Master, or referee of the game. “The GM is core to how Ardent Roleplay operates because they’re the storyteller,” said Ardacious founder Dr. Ralf Muhlberger. “They create the narrative, and they also bring the players together to the table. You can’t really play D&D or Call of Cthulhu without a GM, so they become a locus for the whole experience.” From a sales standpoint they’re a great prospect, as if you hook one GM, you can hook between two and six more players. But a Game Master is also someone with a deep love of storytelling, and that is exactly what we chose to hone in on with our updated strategy.

The Solution:

To capture the imaginations of Game Masters, we needed to pivot from showcasing the aesthetics of individual Ardent Roleplay AR models, or specific gameplay-assisting features, to instead showing the storytelling potential of the software. We quickly determined that this could only be done through video.

Using Ardent Roleplay’s library of AR models,  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 some simple but dramatic music, a little set dressing to reinforce the physical tabletop scenario, 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. What set the town ablaze? What will the players do about it? Of course they have to play to find out!

At a very primal and instinctive level, video always outshines still images. It catches our eye better, and immediately helps us conjure up ways that we could interact with what we’re seeing. In this case, it shows Game Masters that augmented reality can do things that physical miniatures could never do. A Dungeons & Dragons fanatic could spend dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars crafting a detailed town to the same level as the one seen in Ardent Roleplay’s video, but they could never set it on fire! 

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

Ardacious are an ambitious and forward-thinking group, and they’ve put a lot of work into building a product that’s advancing both the way players engage with their favourite hobby, and also how augmented reality as a whole can be utilised by smart devices. But a common hiccup for any startup is correct positioning, and learning exactly what the ideal prospect is wanting from their products so you can market to them effectively. This experiment with video storytelling proved a turning point for Ardacious, and helped solidify their market position as the first and the best augmented reality tech for physical gaming.