Launch date:

May 2014

Challenge:

In 2013, Ubisoft announced their new hacking game, Watch_Dogs, in which the hero uses a mobile phone as a weapon. Their objectives were to raise awareness of their new title, create engagement with the brand and promote pre-orders. With a year to go between the announcement and release date, how can Ubisoft stay top of mind with their target?

Idea:

Publicis’s strategy was to get Canadian gamers hooked on the Watch_Dogs brand by bringing the game to life under the theme: your phone is your weapon. So they created Watch_Dogs Live, a mobile gaming app that turned every phone into a hacking device.

The App:

Watch_Dogs Live was a mobile-to-real-life role playing gaming app, available for free from the App Store and Google Play. Once it was downloaded, participants created profiles and, using geolocation, hacked thousands of surrounding targets, including ATMs, hospitals, police stations, airport and more. With each successful hack, participants took control of targets, gained experience to spend on skills and moved up the leaderboard. To stay in the top ranks, participants needed to hack daily or suffer losing their targets to other hackers.

Missions:

To increase participation and awareness, four realworld cooperative missions were launched through the app. In their first mission, participants used Watch_Dogs Live to hack an ATM, distributing thousands of dollars to an unsuspecting crowd of shoppers. In a second mission hackers used their phones to blow up a car. A third mission saw hackers take control of a live broadcast of a popular sports talk show. And, in their final mission, the community hacked a secure cargo container to steal its contents.

Results:

200,000 downloads from the App Store and Google Play; ranked in the top five games in the App Store; 500,000 YouTube video views; 8,700,000 total hacks; 80% engagement rate; 10,480,000 unpaid media impressions; Ubisoft named Canadian Marketer of the Year.