Activision’s Call of Duty series consistently delivers some of the biggest launches in entertainment history, with their last game drawing more than $1 billion in sales in three days. But to expand our reach to an even larger gaming audience, we needed to do something unexpected for the launch of their 11th title, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Our strategy was to focus more on characters and a powerful story. To do that, we had to find a way to announce Advanced Warfare’s high profile antagonist, Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey, in a memorable and unexpected way that could generate mass pop-culture conversation. So instead of doing something huge, we did something very small. We revealed the news of Spacey’s role with the tiniest of assets: a 10-second audio clip sent to only four people.

In the game, Spacey delivers a speech about power and democracy. We anonymously leaked an audio clip of the speech to four entertainment influencers with no explanation. Their communities went wild trying to solve the mystery of the “Untitled Kevin Spacey Project.” But embedded in the audio was a spectrogram image that, when run through an audio visualizer, revealed the game’s key art, connecting Kevin Spacey to Call of Duty.

Dozens of news outlets speculated on its origin, with Variety finally cracking the code and breaking the story.

We initially worked with Complex to share the audio file with its audience, which kicked off the Kevin Spacey rumblings. We then tipped off Entertainment Weekly, who speculated as to the audio file’s nature. Finally, Variety cracked the hidden image and suggested it was linked to Call of Duty. Once the Call of Duty YouTube community caught wind of the Kevin Spacey audio file, they further dissected the image and confirmed the Call of Duty connection. The news then quickly spread to other gaming and entertainment media outlets, ultimately culminating in Yahoo! featuring the story on its homepage. The entire program unfolded to the public in less than 48 hours.

The one-two punch of innovative spectrogram technology and boundary-breaking PR paid off spectacularly. The Kevin Spacey audio clip and hidden image went viral after being featured by Complex, Entertainment Weekly, Variety, and Yahoo!, among several other video game/entertainment media outlets, generating more than 300 million impressions. The reveal captured the attention of the broader entertainment audience, generating an unprecedented 90% positive sentiment in social conversation. It also paved the way to all-time high views for the reveal trailer, with more than 28 million views. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare became the #1 selling console game globally in 2014.