Earlier this month we saw two examples of innovative mobile campaigns promoting videogames from Google, with its Street View-style exploration of Activisions Destiny and the Giferator campaign for EAs Madden NFL 15. Its shared another videogame campaign leveraging an impressive range of channels, this time for Mays Watch_Dogs release from Ubisoft, which sold 4m copies in its first week of release – a record for the publisher.

Working with creative agency Biborg and media agency Mindshare, Ubisoft promoted Watch_Dogs with digital out-of-home ads at a PlayStation installation in Paris Quatre-Temps shopping centre. Powered by Clear Channel, the screens invited shoppers to hack the ad by scanning a QR code, which entered them into a instant-win competition for Ubisoft- and PS4-related prizes.

Online, this was supported with a YouTube expandable Masthead unit, which received over 148m impressions. The ad featured a trailer for the game and a pre-order purchase button. More interestingly, it also continued the hack this ad theme with a QR code which, when scanned with a mobile device, changed the content of the ad on the first screen to play an interactive cross-platform game.

On the mobile web, rich media ads asked users to hack the current site before expanding into a takeover ad, which saw eight per cent CTR. These were supported with relatively simple engagement ads on the Google Display Network, which had a three per cent expansion rate.