Recently, the biggest annual gala in video game industry, presented by the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), the Electronic Entertainment Expo, referred to as E3 is being held in Los Angeles, from June 13-15. Besides the fanaticism over the spot, All the video game companies are eager to launch their new games demo or consoles or news conference. For such geeky and ‘otaku’ industries, they will also promote their upcoming games in unconventional ways. Undoubtedly, the Call of Duty (COD), the most popular First-person Shooting game (FPS) series on different platforms like PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, have the most successful social marketing strategies in the campaign against others.
Ahead of the launching of their ninth game, COD: Black Ops ll, they promoted their new sequel by encouraging their potential customers to interact with ads themselves. The game company, Activision created a campaign that utilizes Millennial Media’s Photo Shoot feature, which allowed consumers to take a picture and insert it into an official COD soldier. In addition, once the picture is created, the user can download it or share via social media. People are also free to send a tweet directly from this application. After they share or tweet their customized soldier photos on the social media, other viewers can access to the official COD website through links, where they can watch the trailers or order the game. As a result, the rich media unit drove over 15000 interactions and the game itself grossed over 1 billion dollars in 15 days. Isn’t it amazing?
In the next year, Activation chose Instagram as a medium for their marketing campaign for the next sequel, COD: Advanced War. Unlike the last year that they used another media company, a mission called Mission Zero was created to encourage players creating an interactive story by themselves so that the customer experience of involvement was brought to a new level! Mission Zero uses Instagram’s tagging feature to lead users through a photo story to preview some new features, in which Mission Zero asks the player to tag an option for actions in the story such as “head into the alley”, and then the story goes to the next page. Players can also earn points in the game by connecting their social media with the game account. Finally, this activity increased followers’ numbers to an unprecedented level.
After two successes, they decided to try something different in the next year for Black Ops lll. At that time, even though it’s been three years since the last Ops ll was released, around 12 million people were still playing Ops ll, so the marketers wanted to seize this opportunity to promote their new game. First, they wrote an update for the Ops ll and deceived players that this was just a routine update. While everybody was downloading, they “hacked” into users’ games from all over the world and deployed Snapchat codes on the posters in the game’s scenes! Players noticed that updates and were transferred to the official Snapchat account of COD, where they could see the latest feed about Ops lll to be explored! This event created a buzz over all the social media, like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Players compete to figure out the code for the first place. Finally, this campaign resulted in 1.3 billion impressions in just five days and also won nine marketing awards.
From these successful campaigns, we can see how important the marketing methods are. Building up the story, capturing the customers, and then a chain reaction happens.
References
https://www.clickz.com/activision-and-akqa-hack-instagram-for-call-of-duty-fans/28956/
https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2016/06/call-duty-hacked-game-get-500000-snapchat-followers/
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