Weplay

Weplay had built something genuinely fun: a browser-based arcade where Kenyan players could jump into titles like Head Soccer, challenge a rival, climb a leaderboard and win points, all without downloading anything. The product worked. The problem was that almost nobody outside a small circle of early players knew it existed.

Their social channels were posting inconsistently, with creative that looked like generic international gaming content. Nothing in the feed sounded like a Nairobi group chat, so the platform never triggered the competitive, banter-driven instinct that actually makes people open a game. Paid media had been tried in short bursts with broad targeting, which burned budget on curious clickers who never played a second match.

Weplay needed two things in a short window: creative that felt unmistakably Kenyan, and paid campaigns on Google and Meta that acquired players who would come back and keep playing, not just register once and disappear.

We rebuilt the creative direction around rivalry and Sheng. Instead of describing features, every asset dropped the viewer straight into a challenge: 'Rival ako ready. We uko?' paired with a real in-game chat thread, or 'Game lag ama skill issue?' next to a player losing a match. Each visual carried the Weplay Arcade identity, a real screenshot of the platform, the www.weplay.game address and one unmissable Play Now button, so the path from scroll to match was a single tap.

That creative library fed a three month social calendar of static posters, chat-style carousels and short cutdowns for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok placements, with hooks written to be screenshot and forwarded to a friend, which is how competitive gaming actually spreads in Kenya.

On paid, we ran Meta campaigns segmented by mobile gaming interest, football fandom and lookalikes built from active players, and Google campaigns capturing high-intent searches for free online games and browser games in Kenya alongside YouTube and Display retargeting. Creative was tested weekly, losing hooks were cut fast, and budget was pushed behind the assets that produced returning players rather than the ones that only produced cheap clicks.

Across the three month sprint the campaigns delivered more than 4.1 million impressions and grew new registered players by 185% against the pre-campaign baseline, while cost per install fell 42% as the Sheng-led creative began outperforming everything tested before it.

The bigger win was behavioural. Matches played per user rose 64%, meaning the campaigns were not just buying sign-ups but recruiting players who stayed to compete. Social engagement settled around 7.9%, driven almost entirely by the rivalry hooks that players tagged each other in, and paid media held a steady 3.6x return on ad spend by the final month.