The Best Marketing Campaign of 2009: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The the Twilight: New Moon movie was supposed to break all kinds of records when it came out and impressively it made $120 million during it’s first weekend. COD:MW2 or MW2 made $550 million — in its first few days!

Let that settle for a minute.

It’s a recession, millions of people are unemployed and yet a videogame which retails at $60 made all that mad cash? Ridiculous? Yes when you consider we’re talking about a videogame and not a movie. But if you break it down and look at a ravenous fan base that was still playing the first game matched with a Kraken size marketing campaign what you get is one of the biggest video game launches ever and once again a top-rated, top selling game that outshines it’s predecessor in every way shape and form.

Rolling back to the success of the first game which continued to pull impressive numbers even 4 months after its initial release you can see where this thing started.

The Breakdown
Not very long after Infinity Ward’s home run in a box Call of Duty: Modern Warfare another COD was released called World at War … but this was not a sequel to modern warfare. Decent game, yes, but a follow up, no. When we finally got wind of what the real MW2 was going to look like well — then it was on.

Right from the onset of this marketing blitz we got to see how PR in the right hands can not just get people excited about a game but actually get the game to sell even more.

A Twitter page asking fans what they want to see in the game? Check. What better way to get every possible suggestion you could give credence to or toss? Then take that same page and use it to give the same fans an inside look as the game is being built. Can we say Pavlov?

It’s all about the branding

So to really give this game that “stamp” the used Infinity Ward used the branding of the developer and the game’s logo and sold that as the iconic image  in all their E3 signage and marketing material.  The minute you saw it, you knew what it was — like seeing that Marvel comic flip at the beginning of their comic book movies. A simple, clean presentation with a clever countdown date, a lot of buzz and very little intel to go on. Then slowly but surely things began to take shape. Okay so maybe the viral video promoting the game in a fake YouTube PSA called Fight Against Grenade Spam (F.A.G.S) wasn’t the brightest of ideas, but it did get people talking about the game.

But the trailer — oh that first trailer — what a way to get people excited about something in November besides football and turkey. Well executed and replete with all the things you would expect to see from this game it started a buzz that would eventually develop into a boom. When the game launched, Xbox live users logged in more than 5.2  million hours of multiplayer time. Keep in mind the game had a midnight release so we’re looking at a full 24 hours of people buying the game and then playing it incessantly.

Big Marketing Budget = Big Success

Let’s pull back the curtain though on these impressive numbers in sales and fan glorification though. How were they able to pull this off? Basically Activision allegedly spent more money on promotion, distribution and marketing than they did on developing the game. A little less than a quarter of the estimated $200 million budget was for development. What does that mean? It means that the  marketing budget gave them coverage in print, on television and the web with a heavy push the last month before release. It means that they wouldn’t run out of copies come game release day when they opened the doors for midnight sales. It means that they could also offer special edition packages and the mammoth 250 gig special edition Xbox 360 console as well and still sell them because people wanted to get those night vision goggles or that one of a kind console. It means that they spent money — to make money.

What we have here is a strategy that was mapped out, knowing that the cash cow was going to produce golden milk as long as they took extra special care of it no matter what the cost. Did it work? If making more than double what you spent on this title in a few days counts as success then yes. The beauty of it is that after all the hype (and controversy) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was an unparalleled success and all this right at the beginning of a holiday season where word of mouth and success translates into a hot ticket item.

Well done to Activision and Infinity Ward for making lightning strike twice. The bar hasn’t been raised, it’s been given an elevator ride 12 stories up.

The Best Marketing Campaign of 2009: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2