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ACTIVISION × CENSUS

How Activision Launches Marketing Campaigns in a Single Day with Census’s Universal Data Platform

Activision replaced a packaged CDP with Census’s Universal Data Platform on top of Databricks. Centralizing their marketing stack for the first time unlocked the ability to unify audiences across owned and paid channels for omnichannel marketing. Their UDP improved their marketing agility, speeding up audience creation on average from 1 week to 1 day.

Industry: Gaming, Entertainment

Headquarters: Santa Monica, CA

Company type: B2C

Team: Data, Marketing

Use cases: Ad Audiences, Marketing personalization, Dynamic Audiences

Featured integrations: Databricks, Braze, Google, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter

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 send personalized emails and ads, re-engage inactive players, and promote new game launches across its community of subscribers.

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Results

    1. Massive improvements in time savings and marketing agility — Activision reduced their audience creation SLAs from 1 week to 1 day and saved 10 hours a week of troubleshooting time.
    2. Advanced marketing personalization — By using Census, Activision can now create
      audiences with the most timely data, “increasing our capabilities for who we can engage
      and when we can engage.”
    3. Unlocking consistent omnichannel marketing — Before, Activision maintained separate systems for owned and paid channels. Census helped Activision unify audiences across both channels for more personalized engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Kynan
“Census helped us leverage technology in the right way to make sure we orchestrate most effectively.”
Kynan Barton

Marketing Analytics Engineering Lead

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Challenges

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

Data Logging — Data loading pipelines were managed by the CDP, lacking low-level logs.

“Without Census’ time-of-send reporting and warehouse writeback offerings, we had to rely on custom logging, and aggregate metrics. Census now delivers request level logging in an easy to use package, cutting down engineering development hours.”


“The CDP was a really managed service. So we had to go through the CDP, ping our stakeholders or our client reps, and say, ‘Hey, can you please reprocess that record?’ And obviously, there was back-and-forth there that would take time.”

 

Data Fidelity – Traditional CDPs contain additional touchpoints that may cause discrepancies

“Previously, the process of getting data from our warehouse to final destinations required a few steps and touchpoints. This was something we had to live with on our traditional CDP. Now that we have a Census powered direct integration between source and destination, touchpoints are minimal, yielding increased efficiency.”

“It was a struggle because there were two or three hops between what we're seeing in-platform and our warehouse, which made potential discrepancies challenging to troubleshoot.”

 

Lack of Reporting and Analytics — The CDP was only designed for marketing teams and lacked the robust data features that Activision required.

“Our CDP hosted all processes and lacked the Census suite of observability features. This made us reliant on internal systems and ad-platforms, introducing complexity and reporting lag.”

 

Solutions

Activision moved to a Universal Data Platform architecture by using Census as the Data Activation solution on top of Databricks. This helped Kynan’s team leverage existing data infrastructure, creating a marketing platform that’s highly scalable, agile, and governable for all of Activision’s customer engagement goals.

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Results

Massive improvements in time savings and marketing agility — Activision reduced their audience creation SLAs from 1 week to 1 day and saved 10 hours a week of troubleshooting time.
“It's been a life-changer. Now the team can focus on more important things instead of justmaking sure data gets from point A to point B.”

“Now we can develop, automate, and deploy a bespoke audience same day.”
 
“Moving to a more self-serve architecture has been huge for us with the move to Census. For example, the capability to mirror datasets was something we were working on with our prior CDP that was bespoke. The fact that we can set up a mirror sync in Census with just one click has increased our catalog of what’s possible.

 

Unlocking omnichannel marketing — For the first time, Activision is 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 two separate systems. With Census and Databricks, they can define the audiences once in Databricks and use those same audiences across their CRM and ad channels. With a central hub of fresh and trustworthy data, they can now target audiences and run marketing test much faster and more reliably.


“We use Census as the hub to send audiences to both our CRM tool and paid media channels, which previously required a significant coordinated effort internally.”


Census also helps Activision measure the impact of 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 AB 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.”

Improved personalization — Activision’s marketing team can now create audiences faster than ever before.

The previous CDP required custom code and development. Since leveraging Census, setting up no-code UI marketing syncs is quick and effortless.“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.”

 

Looking Forward

Activision is a great example of how the right marketing infrastructure can increase agility and trust across the organization. 

Kynan is excited to find more ways to leverage Census in the future.

Ready to take your data-driven marketing strategy to the next level? Get a free onboarding of Census today.

 

From your data warehouse to all your apps, customers, and agents.

Without code or CSVs.

Start using Census today by booking a demo with one of our experts.

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