How Northwind Mobility launched an EV brand to 40M players
Brand awareness campaign · 6 weeks · Nova Racers + Tiny Kingdoms
The brief
Northwind Mobility was bringing a new electric vehicle sub-brand to market and needed to build awareness with an audience that has largely stopped watching linear TV. The media plan called for high-attention video at scale, with a hard requirement: zero tolerance for unsafe adjacency, because the launch creative featured the founder.
Why BidRole
Northwind's agency had spent a month on brand-safety clearance for a comparable open-exchange buy the previous year. With BidRole, every placement was inside a title we operate, so the clearance conversation was a single review of four specific games and their content guidelines. It closed in two days.
What we ran
A six-week campaign across Nova Racers and the soft-launch audience of Tiny Kingdoms:
- Full-screen, sound-on video in the rewarded slot, opted into by the player
- A branded track in Nova Racers for two weekend live events
- Sequential frequency capping so no player saw the core film more than four times
Results
The campaign reached 41M unique players. A brand-lift study run through a third party showed an 18-point lift in aided awareness among exposed players versus a matched holdout. Video completion averaged 92%, consistent with rewarded benchmarks across our portfolio. There were no brand-safety incidents, because there was no unknown inventory in the buy.
"The inventory is genuinely first-party, so our brand-safety review took a day instead of a month." — Dana Whitfield, VP Growth Marketing, Northwind Mobility
Northwind has since booked a follow-up campaign tied to the vehicle's on-sale date.
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