❖ Version History ❖

March, 2024
As you may have read in our previous post of the Librarium Games Design Journal about budgeting our Kickstarter Campaign for Phoenix Farm, we have a wealth of plans in mind for building up our web marketing & peer reviews. Our last post was all about how to anticipate the budget of this process, but today we are going to do the fun part and talk about the look of all these designs!

Now, that’s a lot to look at, so let’s take a moment and consider what exactly we are shooting to do with Board Game Geek, and how we are going about it. For starters, when you embark to do web advertising through BGG, they want you to make at least five types of banner ads. They have this expectation because there are such a variety of places these banner ads might be placed around their website, on their newsletter, and in various other locations.

But, having exactly one of each category is not a great way to play the game of web marketing, and BGG urges you to consider this aspect! Think about it this way: if you make one banner, and it is not appealing, then it will never work. However, if you make 3-4 banners, and over the course of a couple days one of them get clicked a thousand times more than the others, then BGG will automatically begin featuring this ad more than the others, because something about it just works. This is typically called A-B advertising, because you bait various customers with two different options, and then pursue whichever one works better as you receive feedback.

So, with five different categories of ads to be made, and at least two options needed for each, this is how we got to the huge image of 16 items shown above… but let’s take a moment to examine each of the categories individually!

First up, we will look at the super tiny guys. These tiny ones are great for cell phones and smaller scope areas of newsletters at 640×200 pixels:

Next up, in a similarly small scale, we have some more square-shaped ads that are used along the bottom corners of a web page. These measure in at 600×500 pixels:

Next up are the first sets of what I like to call “the long bois”. There are various needs for long bois, but most of the time they are featured as the header or footer of a place of advertising. The first category of these that we will look are are measured in at 1456×180 pixels:

Here are some larger long bois we need as well, which measure in at 2400×250 pixels:

And finally we have our largest long bois, who are the same width as the previous ones, but twice as tall, measuring in at 2400×500 pixels:

Now, if you haven’t noticed, the point and purpose of each of these ads is simply one thing: “Do not miss out on this opportunity to shop with us!” – Here’s some dates, here’s some cute art, and here’s a variety of different color pallets to throw you off from thinking that you have seen the same advert twice. These features are… artistic weapons. We need these ads to inspire more than anything two key feelings in our customer base:

1. A Sensation of Fomo (fear of missing out on something that is only around for a short time)
2. Curiosity (we want illusive… come! find out more about what you see & “click” the ad!)

This is why we coat the art with as much nice looking feature as possible that is directly relevant to the game, but try our best to tell you almost nothing else about the game other than the title & where you can get more information! Seems dumb, but it is wildly affective.

In addition to our huge visual media art campaign, we also put in a huge amount of legwork to get a video commercial made for Phoenix Farm. This was an absolute first for us. I have never done professional work with a videography team before, and I have got to be honest, I am so so happy that we did.

It was a huge cost to get started with this, but now we have this video that we can not only share with everyone on our website as a highlight reel for the game features in HD, but we can feature it right near the top of our Kickstarter Campaign page as well! AND! in addition to these places that we will be posting the video, this video will forever be embedded into the home page for Phoenix Farm on the Board Game Geek forum page for the game!

As of the time of writing this post, the video unfortunately only has about 1,000 views, but that is still at least 1,000 viewers that we didn’t before, and every click counts when it comes to getting the world to know what you are up to!

With our budgeting coming together on all of our advertising prep work, it is almost that time to pull the trigger! Be sure to stop back soon for another update in the Librarium Games Design Journal, where we will do a deep dive in all of the launch page information that we have been setting up for day one of our campaign!! And as always, thanks for reading!