GameStop Surprize Attack

Best Mobile Marketing Campaign
& Best Retail/Co-Marketing Campaign

GameStop Surprize Attack
Agency: The Marketing Arm
Client: GameStop

Video game retailer GameStop wanted to dominate the market in the key six-week period leading up to the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and achieve 2 million pre-orders despite the down market.

To capitalize on the 18-34 male audience’s interest toward anything exclusive or limited edition and also keep their offer unique against the competition, the agency developed a program called “Surprize Attack”, including a sweepstakes with thousands of prizes and multiple chances to win.

A mobile game, Task Force 141, was created to add a supplementary level of engagement. Missions drove players to social media sites to gather intelligence and text it back to TF Intelligence. Each of the 10 missions was its own sweepstakes.

The promotion was supported by in-store, online, email, mobile, print, social media and television. In addition, more than 42,000 employees were turned into walking billboards.

The tagline, “Be ready to play. Be ready to win.” reinforced the idea that consumers had to be ready multiple times a day to enter. The sweepstakes required consumers to pre-order Modern Warfare 2 at GameStop. A code on their receipt drove them to enter the sweepstakes online. As the main hub of the promotion, the microsite teased all of the prizes that consumers could win, including a Polaris snowmobile, a Ducati motorcycle and a tricked out Hummer H2, as well as numerous smaller prizes.

A scratch game – in which the villain Vladimir Makarov’s bank account had been seized and players were being offered a cut of the loot – was created to push sell-through of the game and create a final way to engage the consumer over the 40 days.

During the 40-day promotion, surprizeattack.com received nearly 1.7 million visits from 1 million unique visitors. A total of 830,790 entries were received and 91,240 visitors were sent to GameStop to pre-order the game. The final pre-order total was just over 1.9 million.

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