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Role
Executive Creative Director

Agency
Rosetta

Highlights

• Led creative on the account for 2.5 years
• Oversight of team creating a highly targeted messaging system based on data collected from game play

The Story

When people think about big money entertainment brands, some of the first names to pop up might include Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spiderman, Avatar, or The Lord Of The Rings. For good reason. They're all juggernauts, virtually guaranteed to draw huge fan bases, and correlating huge revenue.

That conversation can't exist, however, without mentioning the biggest video game franchise in the last decade, Activision's flagship property, Call Of Duty. The franchise has sold over 120 million units. New releases have become pop culture events, with the 11pm news sure to have a field reporter interviewing people waiting in the line that wraps around the local Best Buy. And while a blockbuster movie may take a while to accumulate its numbers, 2012's Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 cleared $500 million on its first day.

Massive popularity means there's also a massive fan base. As the CRM agency for Call Of Duty, we had a great opportunity to increase engagement, loyalty, and retention. And we had a secret weapon. Our creative team worked side by side with our technologists to create messaging platform that was powered by data. Lots of data. As in trillions of data components, literally. 

By recording and segmenting a gamer's game play data, we could deliver highly targeted messaging to make sure what we had to say was relevant to each individual. We notice you haven't played in a while? We'll hit you with a tip or incentive to come back. We see that you play with the same friends? We'll ping you when they're playing so you can join. We know that you're an expert with half a million XP? We'll send you a different tip than we would send to the n00b you just pwned. It gets detailed. Very detailed. With the volume and granularity of the data, we can get hyper-targeted. And anyone in a marketing 101 course can tell you, more targeted means more effective. 

Without getting into the specific numbers, suffice it to say it worked. Our efforts directly led to increased conversion and retention. And one of the strongest video game franchises in history now has one of the smartest messaging engines in the market. 

Ask Me About:

The meeting when we were awarded the work.