With millions of players still actively playing Black Ops 2 each day, we knew there was only one way to truly shock and grab their attention: hit them right where they were… by hacking into the game itself. We would execute the first ever in-game integration with Snapchat by creating the appearance of a “hack” into the Black Ops 2 online multiplayer maps. We would then leverage Snapchat to release content to get fans speculating about Black Ops 3 ahead of its announcement.

Snapchat’s explosive growth with Call of Duty's core target demo of 18-34 year-olds and its ephemeral nature made it an ideal platform for clandestine tease content that could play off of the secretive nature of Black Ops.

Disguised as part of a standard game update, Snapchat Snapcodes were discreetly embedded into the game, hidden in various locations in the game maps. Players who found the Snapcodes and scanned these images with the Snapchat app would be taken directly to a Call of Duty account where the first clues about Black Ops 3 were waiting to be decoded.

Within hours of deployment, these codes were discovered and word spread like wildfire. Thousands of fans began snapping the Snapcode and flocking to Call of Duty’s Snapchat account to see what would happen next. It wasn't long before the entire Call of Duty community was buzzing about the discovery and what it could mean.

The results were explosive. Hundreds of thousands of fans followed the Call of Duty Snapchat account, generating 6 million engagements with the tease content. An additional 50 million views took place on Youtube, driven by fans picking apart every frame of teaser content. In just 5 days, the campaign generated over 1.3 billion earned impressions and 700,000 social mentions, making it the biggest Call of Duty reveal ever. Black Ops 3 went on to become the biggest entertainment launch of 2015 with over half a billion dollars in sales in its opening weekend.

There is a delicate balance between gamers and the creators behind the games, a thing that Activision never takes for granted. So when it came time to announce the launch of Activision’s newest Call of Duty game, Black Ops III, we made sure we earned – rather than assumed – the attention of our fans. We led with the fans’ excitement before we even started engaging the endemic press or mass media – using technology to enhance the creative output with the first ever video game Snapchat integration right inside the very game they love.

Activision’s Call of Duty series has consistently delivered some of the biggest launches in entertainment, with the most recent installment, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare outselling all other video games in 2014 with over $1 billion in sales. But with this year's installment, a continuation of the Black Ops sub-franchise, Activision faced a unique challenge: millions of gamers still actively play 2012's Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 online each day. To introduce Black Ops 3, Activision tasked us with developing a campaign that would specifically excite these players with first hints about the sequel in a completely unexpected way that would shock the base and reverberate to the masses. They wanted to leverage and integrate mobile & social technologies in an innovative way that could drive widespread speculation and offer a platform to tease elements of the game’s story.