The Call of Duty video game franchise has been played by 25 million people worldwide. But it’s not just played by the stereotypical gamer you’d expect – it’s your neighbour, your doctor, your boss, the mailman who just passed you on the street.

For the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops, we celebrated the game’s incredible appeal, while inviting even more people to join in all the fun. The multi-platform campaign featured a diverse set of actual Call of Duty players and one undeniable human truth: There’s a soldier in all of us.

The goal of the campaign was to make Black Ops not just the biggest selling video game ever, but the biggest entertainment property of all time. To do this, we needed to let the world in on a secret – Call of Duty was indeed for everyone. We brought this insight to life by celebrating the soldier inside us all. The campaign launched with the enigmatic sitting bull figure in packaging and out-of-home executions. This was followed by out-of-home and digital banners that transitioned to our actual players in the same iconic pose. Then, in film and subsequent digital banners, we invited everyone’s inner soldier to emerge.

In addition to the campaign generating millions of earned media impressions, the film alone was viewed over 5 million times on YouTube and named as one of the year’s 10 most innovative viral videos.

Within 24 hours, Black Ops earned an unprecedented $360 million in sales. And in nearly 5 weeks, surpassed $1 billion in sales worldwide – eclipsing the biggest blockbuster of all time, Avatar.