Richard Thompson
Technical Director at Digitas
Johannesburg, Sud Africa
TitoloOperation Enigma
Agenzia
Campagna Operation Enigma
Cliente EA Games
Marca Battlefield V
Data di Prima Diffusione/Publicazione 2019 / 5
Settore Giochi e Giocattoli
Filosofia In the lead up to the launch of Battlefield V – the latest chapter in their long-running Battlefield video game franchise set in WW2 – EA Games needed to reignite the passion of core fans.
These fans are obsessed with the unseen and untold elements of the Battlefield series. Beyond simply playing the game, they will spend their time hunting for in-game secrets (known as Easter eggs) to share with the wider community.

The Easter egg videos they create have over 1 billion views – more than all previous Battlefield launch trailers combined.

So we developed something that they couldn’t resist – a tantalising, WW2-themed mystery to unravel known as Operation Enigma.

Operation Enigma was an interactive, multi-platform narrative with 60 challenges hidden across 30 different channels in seven languages.

For five months, players interacted with chatbot-powered agents, Shazamed trailers, and decoded ciphers within augmented reality lenses.

They found secret messages in sheet music and dove deep into the source code of Battlefield.com. They even used real spycraft techniques like steganography to reveal messages hidden in images and morse code to decipher audio recordings, ultimately leading to the final challenge: solving a real WWII Enigma code using a simulator of an actual Enigma machine!

To communicate with players on a one-to-one level, we developed an AI-powered ‘secret agent’ using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to read and respond to player messages, enabling genuinely personal experiences for players across 7 different languages.

This also allowed us to facilitate a global collective narrative whereby secrets and puzzles could only be unlocked through group collaboration.

Without spending a cent on media, Operation Enigma had 40,000 participants and generated over 7.3m impressions, comments and shares over the five month period.

The best part? Because we collected, linked and tracked every participant to a unique EA-ID, we were able to close the loop in attribution. This meant that 35% of gamers who engaged with the narrative pre-ordered Battlefield V ahead of launch, delivering an ROI of 287%, making Operation Enigma the most effective marketing activation in the franchise's history.
Tipo di Media Branded Content
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