The Challenge

Prodigy Education’s campaign had to overcome three key challenges:

• Awareness and Performance: Standing out in a cluttered Back-to-School season and driving student registration and new users to the Prodigy platform.

• Talent Selection: Navigating the crowded creator ecosystem to identify impactful, kid-safe talent who could authentically represent the brand.

• Regulations: Preventing data collection, making it hard to measure the impact of youth-directed media.
  

The Solution

During the key Back-to-School period, Prodigy leveraged Awesome Intelligence for audience insights and technology to activate a comprehensive audience-first creator program that reached kids at scale, where they were most engaged. This ensured that every piece of media counted to drive major lifts in sentiment and student registration.

Audience-Based Approach: Throughout the flight, Prodigy utilized a strategic audience-based approach, powered by Awesome Intelligence, to ensure campaign effectiveness. Safe data sourced across platforms was used to select the right audience and apply it to meet kids wherever they spend their time. Not only did Prodigy reach them on their favored media platforms, but we also connected with the right kids who over-indexed against Prodigy’s core interests in gaming and education and key values of respect, fun, friendship, curiosity, and kindness.

Prodigy, an online role-play game, appeals to users who enjoy challenges and gaming with friends. SuperAwesome identified this core platform dynamic and concentrated on the Gamer audience. This cohort is highly engaged with digital video, with 83% of them using YouTube daily.

Prodigy combines education and entertainment through game-based learning. The Classics audience is digitally engaged and loves to learn. 74% play games on their mobile/tablet.

Creatives show strong overlap between video consumption (81% use YouTube daily) and mobile gaming (74% play games on their mobile/tablet), highlighting opportunities where content and play intersect, a perfect fit for Prodigy.

Talent Selection:

SuperAwesome used the latest generation of contextual targeting and AI tools to organize the fragmented influencer landscape.

Analysis of previous Prodigy YouTube paid-media campaigns focused on video engagement guided talent selection. Specifically we looked at the performance of pre-roll ads before creator-led content. Eight creators were identified as top-performing channels (with 3.66M average views between them), ranging from obvious matches to ‘hidden gems’.

Phase 1 Results

Prodigy saw a lift in gameplay, with Daily Active Users increasing 27.8% over the course of Phase 1 of the campaign.

Audience Highlights:

• All of Prodigy’s audiences outperformed the benchmark. Caring Classics and Curious Gamers are key for awareness, with players in these audiences having 68.6% and 61.5% view-rates (+24.6pp & +17.5pp vs benchmark respectively)
• Playful Creatives achieved the highest click-through rate across mobile apps, with 6.79% vs total audiences at 3.15% (+3.64pp). Girls over-indexed even further vs “Boys” and “Mixed” content

Creator Highlights:

• 3.8M views
• 62% average view duration on Shorts (+12pp vs benchmark)

Most kids aren’t just watching campaign content; they’re interacting with it, expressing excitement and enjoyment in their own words. The comments include multiple mentions of “play” and “friends”, emphasizing the gameplay loop and the peer connection Prodigy provides.

Brand Lift Highlights: Early brand lift results include a +5pp increase in kids saying Prodigy is motivating (95%) and makes them feel smarter (94%).

Why It Worked

Prodigy’s success wasn’t just about reach; it was about reach within a relevant, receptive audience. By moving beyond traditional age and gender segmentation, Prodigy embraced an audience-first and measurement-driven approach that directly addressed kids’ interests, behaviors, motivations, and went beyond reach to deliver outcomes.

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