Kia Challenges a Toxic Gaming Community with a Sweet Old Granny

Instead of just being the sponsor of online game League of Legends and pasting its logo everywhere, Kia Motors Netherlands, working with its agency XXS, listened to the community and tapped into what is meaningful to them in a recent campaign.

In a toxic community of players bashing and insulting each other in chat while playing the game, Kia disrupted this behaviour and used its brand to turn the negative emotions into positives - by bringing the sweetest player into the game of League of Legends.

A social in-game experiment where an adorable old granny makes it impossible for gamers to spread their toxic behaviour. Just try to insult a friendly old lady. With her love-spreading Twitch channel and her sweet words she entered the world of League of Legends to play like every beginner does and face these intimidating players. 

Within no time her sweet attitude was so contagious that teammates and Twitch viewers showed their sweetness to support her to become better and better in League of Legends.

And it didn’t stop there. Kia secretly rewarded the 50 sweetest players with tickets for the League of Legend Championship in Ahoy, Rotterdam on April 14th, where they could spread their sweetness together with Annie.

Within three days the Twitch channel of Kia’s favourite granny Sweet2Annie1 became the most watched League of Legends streaming channel in the Netherlands - and was top for three days in a row leading to the main event on April 14th in Ahoy, Rotterdam.

It was in the top five fastest growing League of Legends channels in the Netherlands. And Annie became a trending topic on popular gaming platforms like eSports Worldwide.