Recently, a massive load of details leaked out about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 just ahead of the official reveal of the game. While the event might seem frustrating to the publisher, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg saw things differently.

“Friday was a really interesting, a really kind of cool day,” said Hirshberg “No one wakes up and thinks, ‘I hope there’s been a leak and our timing gets all messed up,’ [but] if members of the government and the military aren’t safe from this stuff, it’s a part of our world now. And while it’s definitely not cool to steal other people’s intellectual property, and while it’s definitely not cool to leak stuff that’s not yours, there are ways that you can respond that actually turn the lemons into lemonade, and that’s what we tried to do on Friday.”

“It would be really easy to just obsess over the event, which was the leak, and obsess over how it happened, and that’s only looking backwards,” Hirshberg said. “And in the meantime, your launch just started. And you aren’t always in control of the schedule and the dialogue, and you need to be comfortable of those rapids in this day and age. That’s actually one of the things that separates good marketing from great marketing today.”

The event was Hirshberg’s first major challenge as the Activision Publishing CEO. “There was a diverse chorus of voices at the table,” he recalled of the company’s internal discussion following the leak. “Everything from ‘do nothing; we’re sticking with our plan; this will blow over’ to ‘lean even further into it’ to what we did — and everything in between.”

“We woke up with a marketing crisis and wanted to go to bed with a marketing win,” Hirshberg explained. “So what we did was we kind of took that exact conversation we were having in our conference room outside and had it publicly in social media. Through our various channels, through Robert Bowling at IW, through Facebook and through our YouTube channel, we reached out to our fans and we said, ‘Look, we didn’t schedule this. This wasn’t something we had planned. But everyone seems excited, so we’re just going to roll with it. So here they are, a couple of assets that weren’t scheduled to be out for another couple of weeks, we’re going to release ’em to you today.'”

Those assets included some teaser trailers that have already been seen over 4.5 million times on YouTube. “So if you add those two numbers together, and take the sum and multiply it by 20 times, you’d have what we generated with these four teaser videos,” said Hirshberg. “So I think we managed to turn a crisis into an opportunity.”

When asked if this showed that Activision had done something wrong in the past, Hirshberg responded, “I don’t think it means we did anything wrong. both Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops were, at their times, the biggest entertainment launches ever. I think that what you’re pointing to is the power of response in these moment. And responding is different than reacting or overreacting, or not reacting. Showing a willingness to be a part of the connected, digital, social universe we live in as a company is very powerful.”

“Now, people aren’t consumers of brands anymore; they’re fans of brands,” Hirshberg added. “Social media is a huge shift in the way brands connect with consumers. [Video games and other media are] some of the stuff that we actually use to help define ourselves to others [and] I think people have a very human connection with the stuff they like these days.

“We kept coming back to the fans, to the people who love this game; who are just waiting; for whom that day was just a really cool day,” Hirshberg mused. “All that interest for us we knew was harness-able in a positive way. The other thing we wanted to do was, if there’s gonna be a dialogue about our game, we want it to be between us and our fans and not between the leakers and our fans. You don’t want to spoil the surprises that the game has to offer. Leaks are not positive things, even though we might have used it as a way to amplify our initial viewership.”

Source: Joystiq