Next generation consoles have reinvented the gaming experience, The Evil Within is not a game that relies on cheap jump scares. It’s driven by a slow, sustained, and deeply pervasive sense of dread that sets your mind racing at every crunch of glass beneath your feet and every distant groan from an unseen enemy.  So when we were approached by the agency to create an out-of-the-box execution for Bethesda Softworks, for the horror game ‘Evil Within’, we decided to reinvent the mobile ad.

We asked ourselves how do we create an experience that would stand out and give people the creeps. The answer? The Evil Call. We only had the launch day to create hype so it had to stand out amongst all the other advertisements served on the day.

We all like a creepy phone call story right? That unexpected garble of someone sounding like they’re calling from hell? We took this thinking and created a simple idea for the mobile world.

The Execution

A teaser advertisement directed people to a fullscreen page which resembled their incoming phone call screen . iPhone and Android users were served a phone call from the Evil Ruvik, the main antagonist in the game. Those who accepted the call listened to a desperate plea from people trapped inside Ruvik’s realm trying to get out. Once the call was over the user was directed to a page where the trailer and social media tools were housed.

Social Media

Our mission was to engage as many users as we could via the social media tools, a mobile site shared the experience mobile to mobile via Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, SMS and Google Hangouts. The user was able to send the call to friends via this medium.

The Result

This bespoke campaign’s was incredibly successful for the game’s launch day. The results speak for themselves.

* Dwell times on the ad unit of 53 seconds per user

* Obtained over 460k interactions – that’s a 26% interaction rate.