Find the overlap.
Map the audiences where League of Legends, K-Pop and music-video culture intersect — and build the targeting taxonomy across DV360 audience segments, contextual keywords and fan-site allowlists.
Gaming · 2018
Popstar.
K/DA POP/STARS, scaled programmatically for the League of Legends World Championships 2018.
ProgrammaticMedia PlanningCreative ProductionDV360
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A song becomes a campaign — and a campaign becomes a recruitment engine.
For the 2018 World Championships, Riot Games released POP/STARS with K-Pop group K/DA — a virtual girl group whose members exist as in-game skins. The brief: amplify the moment in GSA and convert cultural attention into new League of Legends players.
We translated the song into a programmatic campaign — built around animated image creatives targeting core gamer audiences, music-genre lookalikes, and League of Legends fan-sites — and ran it through Google Display & Video 360 across the eight weeks of Worlds.
The result: 11.34 million contacts in GSA, 4,900 new players acquired, and one of the platform's loudest cultural crossovers turned into hard recruitment numbers.
Three moves, one campaign.
ApproachAnimate the song.
Produce a set of animated image creatives that carry the POP/STARS energy into static-and-motion display slots — strong character beats, neon palette, on-tempo cuts. Built to perform in fan-site placements and beyond.
Run the Worlds window.
Activate programmatically across the eight-week Worlds 2018 flight, optimising in-flight against new-player acquisition rather than vanity reach — and pacing spend against the tournament's escalating fan attention curve.
Eight weeks, one campaign, eleven million contacts.
11.34M
Contacts in GSA
via programmatic display
via programmatic display
4.9K
New players
acquired in-flight
acquired in-flight
8wk
Worlds window
Aug – Oct 2018
Aug – Oct 2018
1×
Channel
Google DV360
Google DV360
Audiences we mapped.
- 01League of Legends fans
- 02K-Pop & music-video listeners
- 03Esports & tournament viewers
- 04Gaming fan-site visitors
A K-Pop crossover, turned into a programmatic engine — and into 4,900 new League players in a single flight.
— Campaign summary