To Launch Call of Duty Black Ops 6, we took our iconic brand character, The Replacer, and made it feel like he was everywhere, showing up in surprising places across culture, blending his character humor with the humor and tone of different media platforms.
The campaign launched with a :60s commercial on Sunday Night Football using more everyday relatable scenes like him as a Firefighter and sitting at a family dinner to announce the Replacer was back. From there, he spread across culture during a month-long go to market plan with 41 unique films and 21 separate media partnerships that spanned the full month of October.
This effort saw The Replacer take over social media channels of celebrities like the Weeknd, up and coming NBA star Anthony Edwards, QB Kyler Murray, YouTube channels like Club Shay Shay, Complex, Barstool, Sidemen broadcast networks like Sky Sports, SportsCenter, Monday Night Football, brand partnership platforms like Alpine F1, Los Angeles Rams and even print advertisements, as a cover in People’s Sexiest Man Alive and lawyer billboards in Los Angeles.
Each integration and script was written to feel like their own organic content, perfectly fit to the media channel, but disruptive enough to stand out, using our Replacer character to actually replace a key talent at each entity, creating humor that was true to our character while still feeling authentic to their audience as well.
After 21 years, the Call of Duty community has fans more diverse in age and interest than ever. Ranging from 17 to 40, their interests span an unimaginable amount of cultural subsets, with little to no overlap.
Looking back at COD advertising from recent years and community reaction, we realized everything was getting too serious. Fans were getting tired of an overly cool, overly serious, overly ‘badass’ tone, and wanted a change in the marketing.
What we realized digging further through social commentary, reddit threads, and looking back at old Black Ops work, is there was a massive cult fandom for one COD campaign in particular: The Replacer. The Replacer is a character we’ve used to announce additional content being added to a game, but never in a game launch moment. But fans were begging for ATVI to bring back our seldom used cult fan favorite hero, leaving comments on old Replacer YouTube videos and creating compilations of old Replacer films.
So we took a fan favorite character and our disparate audience interests and developed a new approach: The Replacer in Culture, briefing a creative and media approach designed to make it feel like The Replacer was showing up across a wide range of passion points, social channels, and with celebrities that our 17-40 year old audience follows.
The Replacer created franchise best amounts of earned media and organic impressions, from both the Call of Duty community and new audiences. It earned 268 million organic impressions and 180 million organic views, 288% more conversation volume to the previous launch campaign. It also reached 2B total media impressions and 55M social impressions overall.
The combination of the Reveal and Launch campaign helped Black Ops 6 set records as the best-selling Call of Duty title to date, achieving the highest-ever player count on launch weekend, the most day-one sales on PlayStation, and the most single-day new subscribers on Microsoft Game Pass.
