Company – Ubisoft
Agencies – Sid Lee Paris, Iconoclast, Blur
Market(s) –
Timing – July – October 2014
Ubisoft delivered a new user experience by creating a platform for customizing game “hero” avatars — and voting for your favorites.
The campaign for Assassin’s Creed Unity set out to reach “next generation” standards of gaming by integrating more social features — a high degree of peer-cooperation gameplay and customization — as well as new graphics standards and CGI renders. Ubisoft sought to create a campaign with mass appeal to a more mainstream audience.
To create a new kind of consumer experience, the idea was to truly empower gamers by transforming them into the hero. Users can customize the hero character at a very granular level (down to the fine details) and play very cooperatively with peers. For customization, users are offered more than 5,120,000 possibilities for their digital experience. (1,400 of those were integrated into the Assassin’s Creed Unity TV advertisement, OOH & press.)
Sid Lee Paris managed strategy, the Big Idea, creativity and overall project management. Iconoclast managed development of the campaign and Blur TV production.
The campaign created a digital platform where users could embody their customized Assassin and appear as a character in CGI — heroes were featured in both the TV ad and print campaign (OOH and press). The entire team — Ubisoft, marketing and production — worked with the game material to develop digital activation and TVC.
Besides his work in CGI, the TV advertisement film director, Joseph Kosinski, is best known for his films like Tron and Oblivion.
The website reached more than 2 millions visitors in 2 months — without any media buy. The engagement was huge: more than 200,923 avatars have been created. Within the first week of its launch, 563,210 users voted for their favorite Assassins.