How Adobe capitalized on Halloween by giving us a murder mystery to solve

This Halloween, Adobe played out a brilliant card to drive engagement and increase the brand recall on their page. Adobe came out with a murder mystery to test Photoshop skills of designers. Adobe Photoshop has over six million likes on its page and as Facebook is reducing the page reach, this comes as a brilliant strategy to increase brand engagement and awareness.

Who killed Professor Photoheim is a murder mystery in the form of a photo album which went live on their Facebook page on October 28. Adobe has been posting a clue every day at 10:00 AM PST. Three people are suspected to be the killers of the professor. To solve the mystery users have to download a huge 150 MB PSD file which contains the clues and the murder scene. Users need to play with the files discovering clues in over 40 layers and playing around with effects using their Photoshop skills.

As the clues lie hidden under several effects and the engagement time with the game is really high (yes, our design team is already hooked to it), users have to post a screenshot of the proof as the comment on the original album for their solutions.

Playing on context

Adobe has played brilliantly with Halloween and caught on the context. Compared to other posts on their Facebook page, this has garnered over 10 times the reach. And even in terms of engagement, this campaign has trumped other posts. One of the two links which were given for the first clue was clicked over 5000 times and around 10,000 people had liked the post. A 50% engagement rate is indeed impressive, though it is only for a single link (we could not determine the engagement rate for the Adobe cloud link as it is not a bit.ly link).

How do you think brands can capitalize on context and create awareness for themselves without using much resources and capital involved. Do let us know in comments.