Behind the Arcade: Your Year in Demos

Today, we launched our inaugural ‘Your Year in Demos’ Arcade - a personalized celebration of how creators built and published over 37,000 demos and reached more than 5.2 million people with their stories in 2023.

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Here’s a look into why and how we created this campaign.

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'Tis the season for storytelling with data

The start of December brings a lot of things — holiday cheer, the thoughts of New Year resolutions, and, in recent years — yearly 'reflections' from the tools that we use and love.

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The most notable product to do this is Spotify with their "Wrapped" campaign. When it dropped at the beginning of the month, It was virtually impossible to avoid sharing insights on social media and even in your company's Slack channel. Arcade was no exception to that.

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A foundational part of what drives the campaign's virality is their ability to storytell.

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They're not just sharing numbers for number's sake. They turn data into conversations and always find ways to stay culturally relevant.

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Having a personalized "thank you" from Taylor Swift helps, too 😉 .

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At Arcade, we aim to empower teams to tell better product stories by showing their product, not just talking about it.

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So, in the spirit of 'Show, Don't Tell,' we decided to challenge ourselves to explore what our take on a 2023 rewind could look like… using Arcade .

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From Idea to Arcade

The idea for the ‘Your Year in Demos’ campaign started in November with our Arcade Adventure launch.

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As part of this launch, we released Custom Variables, which gives creators the ability to tailor content in a demo at scale. It’s no secret that personalization boosts engagement, but trying to customize one by one takes too much time. So whether you’re sharing your Arcade with ten or 10,000 people, you can make it as individualized as you like.

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We knew Custom Variables had unlocked a new way for customers to combine more data-driven, personalized storytelling — just like Spotify.

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The first step was to identify the core metrics we wanted to share. There’s no point in just sharing data for data’s sake, so we brainstormed all the potential data points we could share and then asked ourselves, “Why would they care about this?”.

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That led us to break the data into three categories:

• My Usage (Individual)
• My Performance (Individual)
• My Team’s Performance (*if applicable)

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We also launched branching recently, which gives your audience options on paths to take.

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This made it straightforward to break out the three categories in the Arcade, and, post-launch, it’s going to give us insight into how people engage and if there’s a more preferred category.

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As Caroline (Arcade CEO) mentioned in her 'What's inside an effortlessly beautiful demo?' blog post, storyboarding is an effective way to map out an Arcade — especially if you're collaborating with other teammates like we did.

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Once the data was organized, the copy was written, and the designs were finished, it was time to bring it together in the Arcade.

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All in all, there are:

• 3 paths
• 19 custom variables
• 27 hotspots and callouts with custom data

… and all from one Arcade.

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This morning, we emailed thousands of customers with one Arcade.

It feels kind of magical, right?

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Drumroll, please…

Here is an example of a first annual ‘Year in Demos’!*

_{*Note: This is fake data for demo purposes.}

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We hope you enjoy seeing how you built with Arcade this year!