Every year, Call of Duty gets a new game release. 2021's entry, the WWII-inspired 'Vanguard', was met with a resounding "meh." 2022's release would take gamers back to the game's most popular sub-franchise: Modern Warfare. This was the perfect opportunity for the brand to reclaim its cultural swagger. We'd need to convince fans of the pop culture inevitability of this entry, making it feel like the game everyone would be talking about and jumping back into after a disappointing gameplay year.

Nothing bonds together a team quite like a military cadence. The traditional call-and-response chant song sung by military personnel while running or marching, it is the ultimate form of camaraderie. So we brought a little COD swagger and fun gamer personality to it, by writing our own cadence and casting authentic Call of Duty fan celebrities and friend groups to sing the chant in our film. Then we connected them all together through a visual filmic treatment to make it feel like one big global community.

When we looked into the data, we found that when one person in the friend group leaves a game, it's nearly inevitable that the whole group will leave. And that's exactly what was happening, as COD was losing whole teams to games like Fortnite and Valorant.

That helped us focus our strategy not on trying to bring back individual gamers, but instead, create a rallying moment for whole squads to reassemble and rejoin the franchise they loved in the past. We wanted everyone to get a sense that they were the squad leader, gathering their squad back for the most epic fight of their lives.

That led us to a strategy that served to remind gamers their team not only makes gaming more fun, but also gives them a competitive advantage: Your team is the ultimate weapon.

Since WWII, military cadences have been used all over the world as a tool to build soldier morale and camaraderie. With “Squad Up” we created a cadence that felt modern, but stayed true to its military origins. Since our version deviates from the traditional drill sergeant call throughout, we needed cues that grounded the audience in a military cadence. We began with the classic march prompt of “Left, left, right, left.” set against analog sounds of stomping. From there we expanded, turning the traditional drum snare into a synth and doubling the beat halfway through the track. Adding to the modernization was getting more creative with the caller’s delivery and collaborated with artists featured in the film like Nicki Minaj and Lil Baby to rap improvised lyrics on set. Finally we replaced the traditional “Sound Off” lyric with “Squad Up” and we had our first Call of Duty music anthem.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare II is now the best selling Call of Duty game of all time. It was the largest Call of Duty weekend one launch, with $850M in sales in the first weekend, and the second biggest entertainment launch of all time, behind only GTA V’s launch in 2014. It was also the fastest Call of Duty game to reach $1B in sales, hitting that figure in only five days.