Activision scales personalized marketing for millions of players

Activision’s Call of Duty is a critically acclaimed, award-winning video game franchise, enjoyed by millions of players across Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and mobile platforms. To support Activision’s marketing programs, the team looked for an advanced and scalable data platform to help them better personalize emails and ads, re-engage inactive players, and promote new game launches across its community of subscribers.

The challenge: Powering real-time personalization for millions of players

Kynan Barton leads the Marketing Analytics Engineering Team at Activision. His team’s diverse responsibilities include audience development, advanced testing, first-party data architecture, business intelligence (BI), and reporting.

Activision’s previous marketing infrastructure, a traditional packaged customer data platform (CDP), wasn’t advanced enough to serve their global user base. The team was looking to deliver timely personalized communications and run marketing tests. As a result, they encountered several key challenges:

• Data loading: Loading data into a CDP lacked low-level logs and meaningful visibility. The team had to rely on custom logging and aggregate metrics to troubleshoot issues. The CDP's vendor-controlled environment meant the team couldn't inspect or correct issues themselves, which required going through external reps, creating delays and back-and-forth communication.
• Data fidelity: The traditional CDP introduced multiple handoffs between the warehouse and downstream destinations, increasing the risk of discrepancies. With 2-3 layers in the process, identifying and troubleshooting mismatches between warehouse data and what appeared in-platform was difficult and time-consuming.‍
• Lack of reporting and analytics: The CDP was built primarily for marketing users and lacked the observability, governance, and analytical depth that Activision’s data team needed. Because all processes were hosted within the CDP and it lacked robust observability features, the team had to rely on internal systems and ad platforms, adding complexity and creating delays. 

The solution: Highly scalable data activation with Census (a Fivetran company)

To fix these issues, Activision adopted Census (a Fivetran company) as its data activation solution to replace its CDP. This helped Kynan’s team leverage existing data infrastructure, creating a marketing data platform that’s highly scalable, agile, and governable for all of Activision’s customer engagement goals.

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The results: Faster launches, unified data, and more effective marketing

With Census, Activision saw massive improvements in time savings and marketing agility, reducing their audience creation SLAs from 1 week to 1 day — a 400% reduction.

“Census has been a life-changer,” Kynan says. “The team can focus on more important things instead of just making sure data gets from point A to point B. Now we can develop, automate, and deploy a bespoke audience same day.”

Unlocking omnichannel marketing

Activision is now able to unify audiences across both owned and paid channels for more personalized engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Before, Activision's owned and paid channels were 2 separate systems, requiring significant coordination between teams to align audiences and ensure consistency across campaigns. Now, with Databricks as the central data hub and Census activating that data directly into tools like Braze, Snapchat, and other paid media platforms, Activision can define audiences once in the warehouse and sync them everywhere they need to go. With a central hub of fresh and trustworthy data, they can now target audiences and run marketing tests much faster and more reliably.

Census also helps Activision measure the performance of their audiences in their marketing campaigns and improve first-party attribution. They can quickly analyze the success of their test and create more effective messaging to drive crucial KPIs.

“Census has increased the fidelity of our A/B testing because we know immediately when data is processed. It's all transparent and as a result, we can quantify our advertising campaigns for a variety of different KPIs.”
— Kynan Barton, Marketing Analytics Engineering Lead at Activision

Saved 500 hours of troubleshooting time per year

The previous CDP required custom code and development. Since leveraging Census, setting up no-code UI marketing syncs is quick and effortless, saving 10 hours of troubleshooting time per week — that’s 500 hours of troubleshooting per year. Now, Activision’s marketing team can create audiences faster than ever before.

“In just a short amount of time, it's become second nature to marketing requesters and stakeholders because they know what we can do now as a result of leveraging Census. It was simple to set up. Once we got our clusters provisioned, it was a one-click process through Census to get things synced. The Census team is always available and able to answer questions quickly.”
— Kynan Barton, Marketing Analytics Engineering Lead at Activision

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