Call Of Duty: Marketing Warfare Activision’s use of marketing to construct Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Brand Identity

One of the most successful video game franchises in the world is Call Of Duty, with the Modern Warfare series being one of the best selling series on the video game market. With millions of players and billions of dollars in revenue it continues to be one of the most lucrative games with an enormous player-base. There is a decent number of research papers regarding the franchise published by Activision as well as video game marketing in general. However, where there appears to be a lack of academic coverage is the topic of constructing brand identity within the video game industry. Thus the main goal of this master thesis paper is to create a better understanding of how this is done, with a specific focus on the Modern Warfare series which consists of four individual games, which were released in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2019. This has been done through the use of visual analysis, where a number of promotional materials, such as different types of trailers, including gameplay and cinematic footage as well as forms of real life footage, specifically behind the scenes footage. In total the sampled dataset consisted of 36 video’s, six for the first Modern Warfare game, another 6 for Modern Warfare 2, ten video’s in regards to Modern Warfare 3, and the remaining fourteen represent the latest 2019 instalment to the series. The results of this visual analysis has led to a number of findings that appeared present within the analysed footage. Those being: Portrayal Of Military Life, Gender Representation, The Role Of Sound, Para-Text & Humour, Settings & Backgrounds, Realism Versus Gameplay and Promo & BTS. From these findings it has become apparent that some of the general key practices of building a brand identity also apply towards the video game industry. Additionally, the concept of militarized masculinity turned out to be extremely present in the sampled dataset. Thus, while the concept of video game marketing was already widely known and researched, through the research conducted within this master thesis paper, it has become apparent that the concept of brand identity and traditional forms of the representation of masculinity are also very relevant in regards to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. The results have also shown a new form of video game trailer footage, a blend of cinematic and gameplay footage, which has not been discussed yet in academia.