Ubisoft: The End Of Society Simulator

Credits & Description:

Agency: Betc
Brand: Ubisoft
Country: France
Advertising Agency: Betc, Paris
Entrant Company: Betc, Paris
Media Agency: Betc, Paris
Pr Agency: Betc, Paris
Production Company: Betc Digital, Paris
Additional Company: Betc Digital, Paris
Copywriter: Adrien Héron (Betc)
Creative Director: Ivan Beczkowski (Betc)
Copywriter: Alban Gallee (Betc)
Creative Director: Christophe Clapier (Betc)
Art Director: Raphaël Perrollier (Betc)
Executive Creative Director: Stéphane Xiberras (Betc)
Creative Technologists: Thibault Dargeou (Betc)
Producer: David Ronai (Makiopolis)
Agency Management: Jean-Charles Caboche, Tiphaine Du Plessis, Eugénie Valletoux, Maxime Huyghe, Michael Korsec, Damien Clanet. (Betc)
Lead Developer: Nicolas Barradeau (Betc)
Brand Management: Guillaume Carmona, Lionel Hiller, Pierre, Miazga, Alexandre Guenounou. Guillaume Apesteguy (Ubisoft)
Copywriter: Simon Lamasa (Betc)
Art Director: Vincent Blachère (Betc)
Creative Technologists: Alexis Galbourdin (Betc)
Creative Technologists: Frédéric Petitpont (Betc)
Website URL: http://collapse-thedivisiongam...
The Campaign
Based on the fictive yet realistic storyline of Tom Clancy’s The Division, Collapse is an end of society simulator that uses real data to create a hyper-personalised experience of events to set the scene before the game’s launch.
Inspired by existing epidemic models with input from Emergency risk specialists, the website simulates a global pandemic of the fictional variola chimera virus. The experience starts after the user has been infected when he is asked to type in his address and before being taken through the fall of society’s dominos (overwhelmed hospitals, out of stock pharmacies and supermarkets, riots, global blackout, fall of governments). The simulation demonstrates how quickly the society that we take for granted can collapse.
As Tom Clancy’s The Division is a cutting edge game for new generation consoles, Collapse also is innovative. It leverages the latest web development technologies and powerful data aggregation and processing.
Creative Execution
The website was launched on the 24th of February 2016 across the EMEA region and is available in 9 languages. Using mainly Ubisoft’s owned media with a trailer, social media posts and an emailing the website quickly gained momentum attracting way over 100K visitors on the very first day.
The viral impact, the social media noise and the highly current topic it relates to generated a lot of earned media attracting a broader audience than the usual gamers and exposed a wide range of visitors to the brand and the game.
As people could simulate the end of society starting from wherever in the world (even from their own home) they were amazed and quite scared to discover how our highly connected and intertwined world could collapse within a few weeks.
The momentum gained by the website lasted for weeks as Collapse has attracted almost 3 million visitors and still attracted over 60K visitors/day a month later.
The result was huge with thousands of posts, shares and tweets from users who were dumbfounded by the realism of the experience.
Media impressions were numerous with articles in mainstream media (Motherboard, Time Magazine, The Daily Mail, I fucking love science, L’Express …) and video game specialized media (Kotaku, PC Gamers, vg247, gamerant ...)
The success contributed to the awareness of the game beyond the gamers. The impact for the brand is undeniable as the game has become the best-selling new game franchise in an opening week and sold more copies in its first 24 hours than any game in Ubisoft’s history. Ubisoft is now the number one software publisher for Q1 2016, with a unit sales increase of close to 130 percent.
To make this simulator realistic we gathered almost half a million data in 3,800 cities worldwide. Each city was built around key urban locations (hospitals, pharmacies, supermarkets, airports.). We also developed a pandemic algorithm - inspired by the SIR epidemic model - which demonstrates the fragility of society by displaying the spread of the virus and calculating the casualties. The website is developed with the latest cutting edge technology including WebGL.
The challenge of the website was to attract two types of audiences
Gamers who don't know The Division to strengthen top of mind brand awareness
Prescribers who are not necessarily gamers but are tech-savvy and/or following the news to strengthen the word of mouth
To promote the website, we put together a strong global media strategy:
Earned media : PR plan targeting video game media andmainstream press
Owned : social media, emailing and digital autopromo
Paid : ad banners