Not every brand can afford to court controversy and literally stop traffic. To achieve cut-through and reach its media savvy 18-30 male audience, Electronic Arts– the world’s leading games publisher– has to.Our brief from EA for the launch of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was quite simple– deliver a high impact launch that dominates the news agenda. However the ‘fame’ of Mercenaries 2 was nowhere near as high profile as other established franchises so our campaign needed to be highly innovative in order to capture the media– and our consumers– attentionWith petrol prices at the pumps spiralling out of control and causing increasing frustrations for the public, the futuristic world of Mercenaries 2 started to blur with reality. We saw the perfect opportunity to capitalise on the news agenda. We gave away £20,000 of petrol at the height of the fuel price controversy.

Over 300 news items including the home page of BBC News Online plus five full page national newspaper hits, four national news broadcasts and extensive radio features were generated in one day.The title shot straight to No.1 in the UK games chart on release selling 58,000 copies in week one alone, 20,000 more than forecast.

£550k worth of coverage was generated as a result of this activity.

Planning was essential to ensure the stunt ran smoothly and media messaging was positive as the stunt would only run for one day and had to be successful.On the day, timing was crucial to generate excitement and awareness which would trigger maximum media impact:• At 6am we organised promo staff dressed as Mercenaries to man the pumps, camouflaged the whole petrol station and had jeeps and signs advertising the free fuel• We pre-alerted all national, local London and broadcast media to the stunt and at 8am we hosted a photocall on the day just as the rush-hour kicked in.• By 9am the traffic was queuing round the block as the public waited for their free fill-up.

The police were pre-alerted to manage traffic build-up and their presence added to the excitement and buzz for media.

• The title shot straight to No.1 in the UK games chart on release selling 58,000 copies in week one alone- nearly 20,000 more than forecast.• Over 62 million opportunities to see were created• Over £550k worth of coverage was delivered • Return on spend was 16:1• Full page national newspaper hits were achieved including Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, front page of the Daily Sport (perfect for the 18-30 male target audience)• London papers The Evening Standard and Metro gave us full pages• Broadcast interviews with an EA spokesperson were conducted live from the petrol station with BBC News at 10, BBC News 24, ITV London Tonight and BBC London all running repeated news items• Huge online buzz generated with 300 online news hits- the peak being the front page of bbc.co.uk contributing to huge word of mouth buzz across the globe