Title	THE END OF SOCIETY SIMULATOR
Brand	UBISOFT
Product/Service	UBISOFT
Category	C01. Use of Digital Platforms
Entrant	BETC Paris, FRANCE
Idea Creation	BETC Paris, FRANCE
Production	MAKE ME PULSE Paris, FRANCE
Additional Company	BETC DIGITAL Paris, FRANCE

Name	Company	Position
Stéphane Xiberras	BETC	CCO
Christophe Clapier	BETC	Creative Director
Ivan Beczkowski	BETC	Exacutive Creative Director
Vincent Blachère, Raphaël Perrollier	BETC	Art Director
Adrien Héron, Alban Gallee, Simon Lamasa	BETC	Copywriter
Thibault Dargeou, Frédéric Petitpont, Alexis Galbourdin	BETC	Creative Technologist
Nicolas Barradeau	BETC	Lead developer
Kevin Hutchings	BETC	Strategy Planning
David Ronai	Make me pulse	Producer

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 cities and society that we take for granted can collapse even from our own home. Collapse is innovative, it leverages the latest web development technologies and powerful data aggregation and processing.

Campaign Success

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.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

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.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

We created this engaging and entertaining website in order to empower people and allow them to experience their own collapse of society. By showing people the impact of such a crisis in their daily life, it gives the story of the video game reality and contemporaneity.

To make this simulator realistic we gathered 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 challenge of the website was to attract two different types of audiences: Gamers who are not aware of The Division to strengthen the top of mind brand awareness Prescribers who are not necessarily gamers but are tech-savvy and follow the news to strengthen word of mouth To promote the website, we put together a global media strategy including a strong owned and earned media activation plan and some paid media. Earned media : PR plan targeting video game media and mainstream press Owned : social media, emailing Paid : ad banners