Brazilians never experienced a real Cold War. The espionage, the code-cracking, the analog technology in its full glory. We took all these elements to build a real radio station, with real Cold War transmissions, where listeners could tune in and crack codes.

Our idea was to carry out an interactive effort targeted at our consumers, based on a real Cold War-era radio station: we turned the broadcasts from this radio station into codes. Players had to decipher those codes at our website in order to unlock in-game prizes. An activation directly targeted at the gamer audience.

To talk about Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War we needed to draw attention from younger consumers. But in Brazil, the Cold War is a distant topic. Making that theme appealing to our consumers, made up of curious-minded gamers and geeks, was a challenge in itself.

The objective of the campaign was to generate buzz around the game and encourage new and existing players who were Call of Duty fans to download and play the Cold War version of the game.

To talk about Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War we needed to draw attention from consumers. But in Brazil, the Cold War is a distant topic. To that end, we brought an experience where our consumers could feel first-hand was it’s like to be a Cold War spy.

UVB-76 is a Cold War-era ghost station from Russian that remains active to this day. This station broadcasts messages that can be picked up online. This led to a lively debate around the theme in the geek community worldwide.

We used those messages and turned them into codes for our consumer to crack so that they could earn exclusive in-game perks.

The target audience for the effort was both existing and potential fans of the franchise. Brazilian gamers who love to play a new release, who are into action and adventure and who will never miss the latest FPS. That demographic represents a little over 8 million people in Brazil. They are men ages 18-45 and women ages 18-30.

Our strategy to work with gamer influencers was to reach an audience as wide as possible within the geek and gamer community in Brazil. We made sure not to step outside that community as, due to the limited investment for this campaign at our disposal, it made more sense to speak directly to those who would be interested, the players of Call of Duty, rather than trying to attract other types of gamers to our platform.

We first launched a video content piece on the brand’s social directing viewers to the website where the effort was developed.

We carried out other forms of promotion alongside, such as in-game billboards and digital influencers trying to figure out the codes on their livestreams on both Twitch and ProPlayers.

Once consumers were on our website, they interacted with a 3-D radio. By turning on the radio, they would listen to the broadcast from UVB76. Every 10 minutes, they would hear a code that we selected from a database of 30 years. Consumers then needed to crack these codes by inserting the first letter of each word announced and the numbers read on air. Those who got those codes right received a promo code into their inboxes to use in the game.

The campaign was picked up by leading gaming and e-games portals worldwide. The prizes were so popular that we had several hacking attempts on our website. A few hackers actually managed to clandestinely put those codes up for sale on Call of Duty forums.

The gamer community rallied on WhatsApp groups to share the codes they cracked. We also had the spontaneous participation of famous people.

Users browsed the website for an average of 9 minutes and cracked a total of 10,000 codes. The Call of Duty gaming community in Brazil total 2 million people. We had more than 1 million visits to the website.