Soap Codes

We gamified Call of Duty’s EMEA Twitter channels to run a giveaway that fed the fandom.



In Call of Duty, players customise their weapons with small, decorative cosmetic items. Imagine a keyring, if your keys were a computer-generated Assault Rifle.



Our task was to give away free codes which could redeem one of these keyring-style digital objects. The weapon charm was a cartoon bar of soap with a winky face: a playful representation of the plucky Scottish soldier John ‘Soap’ MacTavish, one of the game’s most legendary characters.



Every member of our team is a Call of Duty fan. But we don’t rely on our own points-of-view alone. We constantly immerse ourselves in social listening to deepen our understanding of our community’s habits and humour.



We decided that to get a code, players had to earn it. Our followers had to cooperate as a team by commenting enough soap emojis to reveal the mystery in-game item. The more emojis they replied with, the more of the Soap cosmetic was revealed in a Twitter thread where we shared static illustrations of the item gradually appearing from behind a wall of suds.



Weeks after the drop, the community couldn't get enough. Every post became an opportunity to request more codes and more soap. The community were more hungry than we'd ever imagined. The response gained such momentum, creators and influencers got involved without any outreach. They just wanted part of the hype. A fan’s TikTok repost of our content went viral, and a black market for Soap codes even formed online with people selling codes via online marketplaces.