Three billion people play video games. They spend more time in game environments than most brands spend in their most valuable media placements. The campaigns in this article operate inside the game. They find products already hidden in game worlds. They build weapons that work. They plant glitches in owned media. They hire assassins. They use scoreboards and commentary AI as their delivery mechanism. Here are eight tactics from the Commerce Engine that make the game do the work.
- Hunt The Object — the product or its equivalent exists inside the game; find it, claim the real thing
- Hunt The Target — a human target carries the reward; find them, eliminate them, claim it
- Find The Glitch — the reward is hidden inside a deliberate flaw in the brand's own digital media
- The Branded Game Asset — the brand builds a playable tool or weapon inside the game with genuine utility
- The Game World As Map — the brand reads the existing game environment and reveals what's already there
- The Game Mechanic As Product Demo — the brand claim and the game mechanic are the same thing
- Hijack The Game's Infrastructure — the game's native systems become the advertising placement
- The In-Game Assassination Service — professional gamers are deployed to interrupt players and connect them to a real-world brand moment
1. Hunt The Object
The product or its equivalent already exists inside the game as a findable, claimable object — hunt it down and earn the real thing.
Call of Discounts — Mercado Libre, GUT São Paulo, 2025, Brazil
Mercado Libre noticed that Prop Hunt — a hide-and-seek mode in Call of Duty where half the players disguise themselves as everyday objects — was already full of items that existed as real listings on its marketplace. GUT São Paulo mapped 420 props across 16 game maps to their real-life equivalents and rewarded players who hunted them down with discounts on those exact items. The prop being hunted and the product being discounted were the same object. Neymar Jr. played as several matched products — a children's toy, a golf bag — and players who eliminated him received steep discounts. Sixteen thousand discounts redeemed within 45 minutes. $1.3 million in sales. The most watched livestream on Twitch Brazil that year.
