We know gamers scour the internet for news about their favourite franchises months before release. We also know that they don’t respond well to marketing jargon, which has helped sites such as Twitch, the top streaming site for gaming, see an increase in users engaging with gaming content presented by influencers. These are the new trusted sources for gaming. We needed an authentic voice that could speak for the fans. We found that in TheRace, a team of COD fans who are passionate about the franchise and have millions of followers on Twitch and a wide range of social channels.

We decided to go rogue on traditional game marketing and give our fans inside knowledge as early as possible. Instead of saving all of our media until launch, we brought forward a plan to give our fans more information at our game’s reveal in a 3-part live-streamed event.

First, we had TheRace interviewing game makers at the reveal of the new title. We streamed the interview in a one hour show and for those who tuned in, we had another surprise: an opportunity to win a trip to E3 where one lucky fan could get their hands on the game before anyone else.

At E3, we had to rise above the other big game announcements. Mission accomplished with TheRace and the developers talking directly to fans at home eager to learn about the game’s multiplayer mode. We even brought our winner from the first stream out to talk about their experience.

To keep momentum high during our last stream before release, we showed TheRace playing live and, as a thank you to those who tuned in, we gave out codes for the beta so fans could start playing along with TheRace team, right then.

We saw outstanding results for each portion of our campaign. Starting with our two-hour live stream at Reveal we saw nearly 500k views and 204k unique viewers, both of which surpassed Twitch's benchmarks of 60k views and 50k unique viewers per hour.

Our E3 segment had over 439k views and over 244k unique viewers during our stream. These numbers also surpassed all the competitors’ streams that ran that day by nearly 2x.

By the end of our Multiplayer Beta two-hour long stream we had over 340k views and over 120k unique viewers, despite others streaming their own COD gameplay during our segment.

Most importantly we had succeeded in making Call of Duty the #1 franchise in North America for the seventh year in a row and had the biggest entertainment launch of the year at that point by generating over $550MM in sales in the first 72 hours of release.