Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the best selling game of 2009, and while being a solid game had a lot to do with that, a solid advertising campaign had an impact as well. Executive creative director at ad agency The Ant Farm Rob Troy talked at MI6 about how he wanted to make the game bigger than the first.
“There was an enormous amount of pressure on how to [improve] the brand with Modern Warfare 2,” said Troy [thanks VentureBeat].
Many months before the game was close to completed, the ad team extracted various materials and formed a trailer which teased at the end that some of the fighting would take place on American soil. Troy noted that while the trailer touches on a lot of the key moments of the game, it does so in a way that doesn't really spoil the game's main story.
Of course, there was also the infamous level “No Russian” that leaked onto the Internet ahead of the game's retail release, sparking outrage in some circles. “There was this massive backlash when that [massacre] footage was leaked, but our team was a bit bemused by it because we had been showing this stuff for eight months,” Troy said.
On launch day, a trailer released that featured music from Eminem's 'Til I Collapse, a bold move considering the franchise had never been associated with hip-hop music before. In the end, there was the perfect storm of marketing, controversy and good gameplay to make Modern Warfare 2 into a spectacular hit.
1 Comments
April 6, 2010
I remember seeing the commercial during football where they showed DC burning, that was pretty amazing. Liked the Eminem one too.