The Activision Publishing CEO describes how the company was blindsided, and how it was his ”first real crisis” probably. ”Like it or not, our launch just started,” he told his team.
An emergency meeting was called to deal with the huge leak, and they were determined to spin it in Activision’s favour. The leak began a ”little fire of interest” for Modern Warfare 3.
”We were probably nine months away from launching Modern Warfare 3. I was at my physical therapist. I remember it vividly. I’d just had surgery on my lower back. And my iPhone starts doing the (vibration noise),” recalls Hirshberg.
”Confidentiality really matters. It wasn’t cool. It was a real crisis. It was probably my first real crisis of this type on the job.” He had little choice but to accept the leak and move on quickly from there, he told the audience at the Ad Age’s Creativity and Technology event at CES this month.
A meeting was held quickly with key individuals on the Call of Duty publishing team. Security was also present as they needed to find out how such a leak occurred.
”I came in and everyone’s looking at me like, ‘What do we do?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m not sure I know, I’ve never been through this before,’” admitted Hirshberg.
”If members of the government and the military are not immune to these kinds of things happening, we certainly are not, and we live in a digital, connected world, and these things happen a lot. They happen with issues and topics far more grave and far more important than Call of Duty.” That’s likely a Wikileaks reference there.
”So I realised in that meeting that we really needed to be having two different meetings…”
Security was dismissed as they already had their specific task ahead of them, reasoned the CEO, which left him addressing the rest of the Call of Duty PR squad.
”Like it or not, our launch just started. It wasn’t on our timetable and we didn’t instigate it, but it’s out there, folks, and we can’t put it back in. And our fans didn’t do anything wrong today - they’re having a great day!” he said.
”They’re really interested in this game, they really want to know what happened, they’re poring over all of the details trying to figure out what’s true, what’s not, is it real, is it not - and we weren’t ready for this, but we’ve got to deal with it.”
”And the wrong way to deal with it is to let the process of figuring out what happened with the leak be the public-facing sort of marketing message. That has to happen and that’s important work, but that’s not the dialogue you want to be having with your fans. Because you go into that silverback gorilla corporate lockdown mode and it’s not appealing, it’s not fun.”
What followed was a ”half-day-long meeting with all the key stakeholders and heavy hitters”, where their goal was to finish a sentence: ”‘If this leak had never happened, we would never have been able to do… blank.’”
”If we can complete that sentence, we can go to bed tonight having turned a crisis into an opportunity and turned a negative thing into a positive thing.” Some still favoured sticking to their original marketing guns and waiting four weeks to start the launch, arguing that only a small portion would actually know of the leaked info.
”The greatest value in this digital connected world is the value of transparency,” he said, ”so we figured, let’s just be straight with people, let’s tell them what happened, then let’s lean into it.” Activision immediately started releasing some teaser content for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube which had been queued for TV.
”A little fire of interest about our game just got started today,” Hirshberg recalls saying, ”and on most other days of the year we would come in and say, ‘Hey, everyone’s on the internet talking about us,’ and that would be a good thing, right? Why is it because we didn’t instigate it and we didn’t control it, why does that instantly make it a bad thing? It’s not.”
”So what we did was we took the fire of interest that had been lit and we poured gasoline on it.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 released and went on to sell over 2.8 million copies alone in the UK by 2011’s end.
