Game on: How Capital Digital in Mexico has built its product footprint in Latin America
Can a media company show remarkable growth by investing in games and cartoons? The answer, as Jack Ades Cohen, President and General Manager of Capital Digital in Mexico proved at this year’s FIPP World Media Congress, is emphatically yes.
By adopting a strategy of ‘applied intelligence’ – using laser-sharp market analyses, audience listening tools and social media – Capital Digital has launched games and a cartoon that have resulted in extraordinary audience engagement.
“What we find usually in Latin America, or at least in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, is that legacy media is quite slow to develop and we have a lot of trouble keeping up to speed with the ever-changing environment,” Cohen said.
“On the other side, new media and content creators lack the infrastructure and the regular revenues that every successful business needs. So, basically legacy media is colossal, but it’s usually slow to develop new products and with trend media it’s great new stuff, but not always able to stay afloat.
“So that’s where we play. We have the experience, the stability, the infrastructure, the software of legacy operations but on the other side, we have the agility, the innovation and the scalability of a smaller market player.”
True of false
Realising that gaming was booming, Capital Digital started exploring how it could tap into the market.
“We started looking at which kind of games were having more impact everywhere and part of what we found is that people were looking at pop quizzes, which was becoming quite an interesting trend,” explained Cohen.
“So, through social stories, on Instagram, on Facebook and Twitter, we started creating polls in which people were able to say if something’s true or false with a swipe. It started booming and showing amazing engagement.”
This led to the launch of a true or false game that had 1 million players in its first year, became the top-rated trivia game in the world and has five brands advertising in the game.
In the wake of this success Capital Digital has also launched cartoon La Vida Secreta de Tu Mente which has been the most viewed content on the Cartoon Network in Latin America, and an education platform, Compas, which features more than 2,000 schools and 80,000 parents.
Year of the Dragon
Next up, Capital Digital is launching a new video game, Quetzi, to tie in with the Year of the Dragon in 2024.
“Applied intelligence has basically been the recipe we’ve been working with, and this is created by three elements,” said Cohen. “We start with market analysis and as long as there’s something there, we go to audience listening and understanding, and finally, whenever we have a concept, whenever we think that we can create something new, we go into social media testing.
“We use social media to test every one of our hypotheses, and in the end, if it gets amazing traction, there’s something there. And that’s when you get amazing results with applied intelligence.”
