Call of Duty – Reaching the unreachables

Call of Duty is one of the world’s most beloved game series. The most recent addition, Black Ops Cold War, was launched recently, highly anticipated by gamers and fans. Despite being a large target group, gamers are hard to reach through traditional advertising. 60 % use adblockers. 75 % pay money not to have ads.

So, how do you reach ad-hating gamers with an ad for a new game? We chose to meet the target group on their own conditions. We chose to communicate our message inside different online-based games where our target group spends a lot of their time. By integrating our communication inside the gaming environment, it became a natural addition to the game where our target group could run into and discover our ads – without disturbing them when doing what they enjoy the most.

Idea

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War takes place in 1981, during the later part of the Cold War, near the end of a drawn-out conflict between East and West. The Cold War is characterized by a political climate and atmosphere, rather than conventional warfare. For us in the Nordic countries, the threat from Soviet was never far away. In fact, history as we know it could very well have looked different. To illustrate this in an entertaining and relevant way, we chose to Sovietify a bunch of Nordic national treasures, like Dala horses, lusekoftes, smørrebrød, etc. These symbols were the foundation of a campaign where we packaged our Russian-Nordic symbols in meme-y ads for the game.

Brief

Create a campaign that in a creative way complements the global marketing for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and gets the attention of the primary target group: Gamers in the Nordic markets.

Ad placements

Units inside selected online-based FPS games.