Situation:

Amnesty International (AI) is a global organization, present in more than 150 countries, and focused on human rights; namely, it fights for them to be recognized and respected.

Brief:

The war in Yemen has affected the lives of more than 6,000 civilians. 50,000 people have been hurt in it and more than 22 million need humanitarian help.

Amnesty International works hard so that the conflicting sides will respect the civilian population, and so that they will withdraw from committing war crimes. They also work to assist the war victims.

Objectives:

- Generate awareness of the Yemen conflict among a younger audience.

- Increase the traffic towards International Amnesty sites & Social profiles.

- Build relevancy & affinity towards AI, as it is quite a polarizing NGO.

- Impact our core audience with a trustworthy & legit message.

Making the most of the launch of “Call of Duty (CoD): Blacks Ops IV”, the number one global bestselling war game, the idea was to launch a campaign to raise awareness of the conflict in Yemen.

We obtained the rights to actual war images after contacting combatants in armed conflicts all around the world.

With that real footage, we mimicked game plays (videos that reproduce recorded games) with some of the best action gamers in the country.

The users were tricked into thinking they were seeing CoD gameplays on these influencers’ channels. The influencers themselves commented, during the game, how “realistic” the graphics and the sound were on this new “game”.

However, in the end, it was revealed that what spectators had seen were actually real images from an armed conflict, and not a videogame.

We made use of an already established strategy, but giving it a twist. We hijack the Call of Duty strategy. We used their same media, resources and representatives to get to their same audience. They spent millions of euros, we spent none.

To do this we used an established format which works with our target audience: gameplays. But we shocked them with unexpected content. And we did it through the gamers, who gave credibility to our campaign.

It was important to plan carefully, since all influencers had to publish their videos on the day of the videogame launch in order to attain the strongest possible impact.

A process started with the search of real war footage from around the world (the rights of which were given to us for free) and of the most reputable gamers in Spain so that they would collaborate with Amnesty International (at no cost).

The 12th of October marked the launch of the latest installment in the number one bestselling wargame in history: “Call of Duty: Black OPS 4”. All the fans of the saga, our target, were waiting anxiously to watch the gameplays of the most renowned gamers in the country.

What did we do? We shared a very special gameplay. The most realistic of all. A gameplay with actual, real war footage. A gameplay that wasn’t a game. A gameplay with the following message:

What you have just seen is not a war videogame. It’s war.

Let’s fight for war to just be a game someday.

When everyone expected a gameplay, what they actually came across was our advert.

We managed to impact 430,000 people at no cost in less than 24 hours.

We involved gamers who boasted of 19.000.000 million followers.

We managed 700% more (vs. other campaigns) of personal info from people interested in AI projects.