Rob Troy with The Ant Farm ad agency in L.A.

Rob Troy, the executive creative director at The Ant Farm – a high-profile ad agency in Los Angeles – managed to reach new heights of advertisement efficiency as he succeeded in using a commercial to inspire an emotional connection between the gamer and the game. In this case, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, a game that would sweep up the competition in its modern combat genre, had the passionate lyrics of marshall mathers (aka Eminem), to help it make a lasting impression; after all, just the breath-taking visual effects, or the wicked arsenal of weapons couldn’t move 15 million units all alone. Without Mr. Troy‘s commercial vision, Activision Blizzard probably wouldn’t have gotten near their current reported earnings: $1 billion.

The goal was a hard sell: draw in a larger audience than the original by guaranteeing a bigger and more bad-ass experience. At the M16 game marketing conference, Troy and his team revealed their reasoning behind their brilliant publicity generator. They explained how they began collecting artwork, animated scenes and portions of the script several months before the game’s November release, which they then strung  together into a series depicting furious combat. They speculated that many American gamers would feel like they were defending the Land of the Free, since much of the action is set on U.S. soil.

Some of the footage used in the ad depicted a massacre

Considering the record-sales of the game, it’s plain to see that this somewhat stereotypical assumption was indeed, 100 percent correct.