To achieve victory, we needed to combine the tactics of a full frontal assault with a covert operation.

That covert operation? Align Call of Duty with a product, and an occasion, that millennial males love: beer.

We turned the restriction of playing within R18 boundaries into a positive, by using beer as a way to infiltrate Australian males’ conversations. Literally providing pub ammo. To keep it authentic, newsworthy and share-worthy, we operated only in owned and earned channels.

Idea: Black Hops midnight pale ale.

The agency’s recommendation to Activision was to look beyond existing media and build a new Call of Duty touchpoint. Grounded in the consumer insight, our vision was to take a pale ale and paint it black, developing a craft beer with distinctive packaging, representing the Call of Duty brand.

This wasn’t just creative use of media, it was the creation of a new medium.

The project stretched beyond the traditional scope of a media agency.

Working with an Australian brewery, we helped formulate the beer, designed the bottle labels and cartons and sourced a distribution company, BoozeBud.com.au.

Our recommended go-to-market strategy for Black Hops was through owned and earned media. All paid media supported the game. PR and social was jointly executed with Activision’s PR team.

Publicity was earned across TV, print, radio and digital in the gaming media and mainstream news outlets.

Activision was not allowed to promote the beer though its own social channels, but by leveraging existing relationships we secured significant social media exposure. This wasn’t just simple social posts and press releases. For beer aficionados, video content was created that captured the Black Hops brewing story.

Crucial to earning pop culture status was using the nation’s most popular bloggers and vloggers to give Black Hops the credibility it needed.

Activision’s policy is not to disclose exact numbers, however independent industry figures confirm the objectives were met.

Call of Duty retained its #1 position. Sales were the highest in three years, exceeding targets for pre-orders and week-1 sales.

Attributing sales directly to Black Hops is difficult, but several factors indicate that this made a significant contribution to brand metrics and sales results.

•Media coverage for Black Hops totalled 123 pieces of content globally and reached over 38 million people

•The story was embraced by both local and international journalists, delivering extensive earned coverage

•BoozeBud all but sold out of Black Hops and received hundreds of requests to ship the beer internationally.

Significantly, no paid media supported this. The hype was generated entirely through earned media.

Black Hops was acknowledged by Activision globally as best practice in building new touchpoints beyond traditional media channels

Cheers to that!