In December 2021, there was going to be a major rehaul to the Warzone game, bringing the setting of Call of Duty’s new premium release, Vanguard, into the world of Warzone. That meant a new location, the tropical island Caldera, a new time period, WWII, and all new updates to weapons, characters, and vehicles. The challenge was that Vanguard was the lowest reviewed game since 2017, selling only 8M units, less than 50% below Activision’s goal. Enthusiasm for the franchise was at an all-time low. Historically, the WWII setting hasn’t been embraced by gamers, as they felt the weapons and action were over-explored, boring, slow, and unexciting. And so, knowing what was coming, gamers were dropping out of Warzone.

We sent some of the biggest travel influencers in the world to visit the fictitious island accessible only in our game. We hand-selected a squad of global influencers and asked them for never-before-posted footage of them in a tropical location. Next we Warzone-ified their video with intense and unexpected visual effects that mimicked real gameplay. We followed it up by “sending” athletes and even a few celebrities to the island. With each of them geotagging their post, we turned @Caldera into the most shocking, “can’t-miss” destination on phones all over the world.

As enthusiasm for Warzone was waning, we ventured to figure out what they were excited about instead. We found travel was one of our audience’s top passions. They were 1.88x more likely than the general audience to be interested in travel and 1.66x more likely to use travel apps.

That made sense. Because gaming keeps them on their couches, glued to a screen for hour upon hour. What was more exciting for them was getting out and seeing the world.

But with limited time and accessibility, for most, travel was something they did vicariously through their favorite travel influencers. In fact, over 50% of all adults under the age of 40 follow a travel influencer.

This led to our goal of creating an unexpected cultural crossover that connected Warzone with a surprising corner of our audiences’ interests: by bringing the adventure to their couch.

The posts garnered over 15.3 million social media impressions and over 8.7 million views on Instagram which was 6x what the gameplay launch trailer received anywhere. Each post saw over double the engagement of a traditional sponsored post. Warzone is free-to-play but the day after our campaign launch, the game saw daily users hit 6.6 million which was the peak in December and the highest user number in Q4.