Watch Dogs: A New Ubisoft IP
Watch Dogs The Game
Watch Dogs tells the story of Aiden Pearce, a Chicago vigilante fighting back against a corrupt city. Aiden uses his hacker skills to take control of the CtOS network, a vast interconnected surveillance system linking thousands of cameras, public utilities, and security systems throughout the Windy City. Aiden combines his computer cracking skills with a formidable arsenal of weapons to take on crime and corruption.
The Insight & Approach
Watch Dog's inherently subversive sell is that all your data is easily available to the highest bidder or hacker. This inspired our campaign voice that presented data and facts about privacy and how easy it is to get your data stolen: Your digital shadow is more vulnerable than you think.
We engineered a marketing voice with proactive/reactive guidelines, templates, content strategy and executions thats brought this insight to life through snackable content, layered pieces like custom infographics, and subversive material.
This helped to build critical mass, new engagement benchmarks and anticipation for the game. And ultimately it led to the main campaign hub - the viral centerpiece of this case study.
A Viral Microsite / Campaign Hub
The Digital Shadow Experience asked users to use FB Connect to see how much of their data is exposed through the lens of a hacker. They received a digital shadow profile showing all of their photos, friends, location data, and anything other data available publicly on Facebook.
After the site launched and immediately drew in fans of Watch Dogs, Ubisoft, casual gamers and also the general public. PRISM at the time was a hot topic in mainstream news media; we were able to capture the curiosity, and frankly the paranoia of the public, to levels of virality that marketers spend a lifetime chasing, let alone acheive.
Results
We amassed over $4M in earned media, with zero proactive press or media drivers. This included press pickups from broad outlets like Time, The Atlantic, Yahoo!, ABC News, and even local news pickup. Needless to say going "viral" wasn't the goal but we got to it. And it felt awesome to see our hard work and our creative intuition pay off.
Watch Dogs: Digital Shadow Microsite Experience Trailer
Digital Shadow Microsite Trailer
We created a trailer to drive organic traffic to our microsite. We felt it was tonally on point to give our community a chance to get excited for the experience. It was picked up by several influencers and gaming press.