Activision Serves Notice to Hollywood: Watch Out

The day we stop treating video games as a niche product for a stereotype gamer will be the day Hollywood needs to check its pulse and start changing its diet. With the news that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 beat out the first five day revenue of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Spider Man 3, people are starting to wonder if that day of reckoning has arrived.

$550 million worth of software sales worldwide means Activision did something right with MW2. Yes, it’s a great game, but there’s much more to it than that. Behind the game was a MASSIVE advertising campaign that treated MW2 as a blockbuster hit that is made for everyone. It may be a slick, quick-response shooter, but the advertising didn’t treat it as such. Instead, the campaign featured on the cinematic, action-film experience of the game to appeal directly to action film fans.

“We have managed to market the game to a wider base,” said Brad Jakeman, chief creative officer of Activision Publishing. “We’re starting to see what used to be a niche form of entertainment rise to challenge theatrical audiences.”

And: Bingo.

Activision isn’t the first to have success with this approach. Rockstar launched GTA IV with a similar campaign and earned the previous record for first five day revenue. It’s all about learning lessons from competing (yes, competing) entertainment media fighting them on their turf.

This doesn’t mean ignoring the core gamers who have been there since the beginning (Activision deftly managed its online community pre and post launch), but it does mean speaking to non-gamers in ways that appeal to them as well. Beyond emphasizing the action film features of WM2 (using a very large TV ad budget), Activision focused on multiplayer as a social media venue for those more casual or non-gamers who are active in MySpace or Facebook for connecting with friends. (Although, one might be hard pressed to compare Farm Town to an FPS.)

The publisher even went to great lengths to engage its major retailers–Best Buy, Walmart and Gamestop–to become active parts of the campaign with creative advertising to build buzz and excite a large marketshare. And if we think we’ve seen the last of the campaign now that the game is out and has made that boat-load of cash, we’d better think again. Activision is poised for a continuing campaign that will continue to sell copies of MW2. And with the possibility of breaking even more sales records on the horizon, it’s likely they’ll need a bigger boat.

[Advertising Age via @stringtheoryone]