Clash of Clans
2025-12-04
Clashiversary: The Birthday Bash That Broke the Vault
Clash of Clans just turned 13, and instead of a typical anniversary, we helped Supercell deliver a two-month campaign packed with story, nostalgia, and community-driven chaos. Inspired by the beloved Clash-A-Rama series, Clashiversary brought fans back into the fold with a mysterious vault, a fan-favourite new character, and an unfolding narrative across in-game events and social platforms. The result? Record-breaking engagement, a major boost in reactivated players, and the highest daily active users Clash had seen all year. Here’s how we brought it all to life.
The Set-Up
Supercell is a Finnish mobile game developer best known for globally successful titles like Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, and more. We’ve had a long history working with them, and they’ve trusted us over the years to concept and deliver a range of content, predominantly producing content for community engagement and retention.
As part of their upcoming 13th birthday celebrations, Clash of Clans planned to introduce a two-month-long Clashiversary event inspired by their popular animated show & web series, Clash-A-Rama. Over August and September, there was to be a wide array of events, rewards, and content for players in-game, as well as an overarching narrative across social media and the game.
Supercell needed to move quickly to start this campaign, and they knew they could trust Waste to produce a high-quality campaign that leveraged our deep understanding of the Clash community.
The Challenge
For Clash of Clans’ 13th Clashiversary, Supercell faced the challenge of surprising and delighting their fans with a two-month, larger-than-life anniversary celebration inspired by the popular web series Clash-A-Rama.
They wanted this campaign to not only excite current players, but also celebrate the game’s legacy by utilising the nostalgia factor of Clash-A-Rama to engage lapsed players by showing them how the game has evolved over the past 13 years.
Enter Waste Creative. We stepped in to craft a playful, community-driven campaign that leaned into both the game’s legacy and the humour of Clash-A-Rama. Through clever storytelling, bold visuals, and interactive moments, the campaign aimed to re-energise the fanbase and prove that Clash of Clans is still going strong after 13 years.
The Objective
The brief was clear: showcase all of the anniversary details (including the events, content, and giveaways), get the community buzzing, and most importantly, everything needed to tie together into a two-month-long, hilarious, story-driven narrative that felt like an extension of Clash-A-Rama itself. This meant leaning into nostalgia, reconnecting with lapsed players, and making fans feel like they’d discovered a secret corner of the Clash world.
Our Strategy
This was our first-ever campaign for Clash of Clans, so we needed to go big. The main challenge as we saw it was to keep players emotionally and socially engaged for the entire Clashiversary season, which would last two months — double the length of an usual season. So, we turned a standard content rollout into an evolving, shared experience — something fans would talk about, return to, and feel part of.
Our strategy team dug into past high-performing community content and researched audience attitudes toward Clash-A-Rama to uncover what truly made it nostalgic and exciting. We explored how the game itself has evolved since the Clash-A-Rama’s original run and pulled insights from recent campaigns to craft ideas that balanced nostalgia with fresh, relevant storytelling.
Our concepts needed to excite players enough to both play the game and engage on social media, creating a sense of progression where the story unfolds with the community — not just for them. We wanted this campaign to bridge the game and the show, letting players feel like stars in the action while fueling conversation, creativity, and speculation through memes, reactions, and user-generated content.
Our Narrative-Driven Creative Execution
Being chosen to lead a fully fledged Supercell campaign was an honour for Waste, so the content we created needed to be both standalone pieces and always tied back into the narrative we’d established and reflect the playful, chaotic tone we’ve come to know and love from Clash-A-Rama. Not a problem for the Waste team.
As part of our creative effort, we invented an original character named Barry, who served as the central character of the campaign. After being locked away for 13 years, he uses his newfound freedom to experience how the world of Clash has evolved since its inception. An immediate fan favourite, he also acted as an in-world proxy for lapsed players to get up to speed on all the changes to the game.
The campaign kicked off with a mysterious Vault that required fans to collaborate on Clash’s social media to guess the password that would unlock it and introduce the lovable Barry. Then, across the two months of the campaign, there were numerous events and rewards for the community, bolstered by our creative, including multiple illustrations that needed to reflect the very specific art style of Clash-A-Rama and further the overall campaign narrative.
To highlight key elements of the narrative as the campaign progressed, we included some larger pieces of content, including a frame-by-frame animation where Barry (up to his usual mischief) manages to transform himself into Bar-Barry, a mashed-up version of himself and a Barbarian, which linked to the evolving nature of the in-game story. This also led to a first for Waste: we crafted an AR Filter for TikTok that created a mashed-up version of some of the game's most beloved troops — it went down a treat. We also leveraged Supercell’s content creators by issuing them a challenge from Bar-Barry, which, if failed (as was the plan), meant they’d need to try some "tasty" treats. Both these pieces of content resulted in some incredible UGC from fans and creators alike.
To wrap up the campaign, we wanted to ensure that the narrative was finished successfully with a nice payoff for fans. As some of Supercell’s plans had changed, that meant we had to think on the fly, so we wrote a Script for an animation that saw Barry locked back up in his Vault after spilling some secrets about what’s coming to the game in future. Finally, as the fans had grown to love this character so much, we created a short music video bidding farewell to Barry and looking back on all the fantastic things that had happened throughout the campaign.
“Bringing Barry to life and watching the community fall in love with his chaotic charm was such a joy for the entire team. We dreamed big, and Clash of Clans dreamed big with us. The long-standing relationship with our client and the community managers enabled us to deliver the campaign players truly deserved. The communication was crystal clear, their trust in our wildest ideas never wavered, and they matched our enthusiasm every step of the way. As a fan-first agency, this felt like the campaign we were born to create.” — George Sadler, Lead Creative at Waste
“To help bring Barry’s chaotic world to life, we wanted to create something visually ambitious that matched the scale of the story — so we built an endless zoom animation that felt like a journey through the Clash universe itself. It was an incredibly fun and unique challenge to create an endless zoom video using a 3D camera… all while transitioning seamlessly between different worlds of Clash. Each scene brought its own optimisation challenges, and close collaboration with the artists was essential to ensure every world had enough depth for the 2.5D effect. All in all, it was a technical puzzle with a seriously satisfying payoff.” — Ryan Walker, Motion Designer at Waste Creative
The Results
The Clashiversary campaign proved the power of community-driven storytelling. Over the course of the campaign, we delivered 109 million engagements — smashing our target by more than 150% — and helped Clash of Clans reach its highest daily active users in over 18 months.
The narrative approach reconnected the community, driving a 21% uplift in re-engaged lapsed players and a 5% boost in new users. Sentiment surged, with positivity hitting 29%, up from a previous yearly average of 20%.
And the breakout star of it all? Barry. His farewell video alone reached an 11% engagement rate, more than double the campaign average — turning a one-off character into a beloved icon.
From vault-cracking to creator chaos, this wasn’t just an anniversary — it was a full-blown community comeback!