Turning a Doritos sponsorship into a tactical mission at Gamers8 Riyadh.
How It Started
PepsiCo wanted Doritos to actually mean something at Gamers8 2023, the Saudi Esports Federation’s eight-week takeover of Boulevard Riyadh City. The setup was Doritos as the official snack of an event that had pulled 1.4 million attendees the year before, with a $45 million prize pool and a Call of Duty co-branding tie-in built around an in-pack promo. The grand prize was a trip to the Call of Duty League Championship in Boston for five winners, and everyone else who scanned a pack got instant-win Double XP.
The challenge was the one every brand runs into at Gamers8: dozens of booths, neon clutter, sponsorship saturation, and an audience that can smell a lazy activation from clear across BLVD. Our job was to make Doritos genuinely worth walking up to.
There was no strategist on the project, which meant whatever strategic thinking the activation needed had to live inside the writing.
The Thinking
Most people walking into Gamers8 weren’t going to win the trip to Boston; most were going to get destroyed in-game and walk off. So the activation had to be built around the truth that the trip was never really the point, and showing up was. Everyone who scanned a pack got Double XP automatically, and everyone who played the booth left with something real, win or lose.
That single decision shaped every other decision.
MAKE IT BIG
اللي يغامر يفوز
The campaign line was Make It Big: your shot at joining the COD World Championship League in Boston. The bilingual carry on the booth was اللي يغامر يفوز, which reads as “those who venture, win”; same idea, two languages, neither one a literal lift of the other.
What I Built
Finding the Booth in the Noise
BLVD is loud, so we had to be louder, but in a vocabulary the audience would already recognise.
Tactical Smoke Signal. Coloured smoke emitters around the booth, framed as supply drops; visible from across the venue and instantly legible to anyone who plays Call of Duty.
Sniper Guidance. Green lasers that tracked visitors and beamed back toward the booth. In COD a laser usually means an annoying sniper is about to ruin your day; ours guided you to chips instead, which is exactly the kind of joke gamers appreciate.
Neither of those is booth signage or exterior lighting dressed up; they’re entries from the same vocabulary the audience already speaks fluently.
The TactiCrunch Squad
A five-person flashmob in full tactical gear roamed BLVD recruiting visitors directly, explaining the mission, handing out samples from branded duffle bags, doubling as photo ops and carrying tactical pads with the mission details. The point was that they didn’t read like brand ambassadors working off a script; they read like part of the world we’d built.
Couch Commander
RakanooLive came on board as our in-booth streamer, a Saudi COD streamer the audience already trusted, given a tactical fit and a play-by-play role. He guided players in real time, offered genuinely useful tips, and lent the whole thing legitimacy in a market where streamers carry more weight than billboards. Without him it would have read as cosplay; with him it read as a setup gamers wanted to be inside.
The Base of Operations
The booth itself was four zones, each named to reinforce the mission frame:
Firefight Section. Where you actually played Call of Duty. Real setups, no lag, no compromised gear; if you’re going to ask gamers to play in front of strangers, you give them equipment that won’t humiliate them.
Resupply Section. Doritos, drinks and branded merch, designed as an in-game supply station rather than a snack table.
Loot Section. Where rewards were displayed and collected, styled like in-game loot drops so the prize felt earned rather than handed over.
Filter Section. An AR Snapchat lens area for photos, designed to look right on Instagram without being embarrassing about it.
The Rewards
Tiered for performance, but with the floor set high enough that nobody walked away empty-handed.
T.A.C.C. stands for Tactical Attachable Cleaning Cloth, a branded pad that clipped to a controller so gamers could wipe Doritos dust mid-match in a single motion. The whole campaign hinges on whether a brand is willing to admit what its product actually does to your hands; pretending the dust isn’t there is corporate, building merch around it is honest, and gamers reward honesty fast.
Tactical Drink Helmet. A wearable, hands-free hydration rig played completely straight as serious gear; the kind of joke that only works because the booth around it is already committed to the bit.
The Boston trip was the only prize fixed in the brief; the rest of the architecture got built up from there. The grand-prize tier (an S95B OLED, a customised SecretLab Titan Evo, a Woojer haptic vest) was real gear gamers actually want, the mid-tier ran through SteelSeries headsets, Razer soundbars and custom PS5 controllers, and the participation tier ran through platform-specific gift cards (PS5, Xbox, Steam) and branded accessories like gloves, glasses, sweatbands and gaming stands. The job was making each one feel like a tier in a single in-game economy rather than a list of products.
The Writing
Beyond the concept and the naming, I wrote the full creative deck, 41 slides covering the visitor journey, the booth zones, the prize architecture and the bilingual on-booth messaging. The writing job wasn’t only sales copy; it was building a self-consistent vocabulary any team member could extend without breaking the world.
Why It Worked
The world held together because we committed to its vocabulary all the way down. A smoke emitter became a Tactical Smoke Signal, the brand ambassadors became the TactiCrunch Squad, the snack table became the Resupply Section, the napkin became the T.A.C.C. None of those names is clever in isolation; they work because they’re consistent, and consistency is what tells an audience the brand actually understands the room.
The audience got real respect out of it. We partnered with a streamer they actually watched, used real COD mechanics in the framing, and didn’t talk down to anyone, and we acknowledged the dust on their fingers instead of pretending the chips come without a downside.
The participation logic, not the prize, was the actual concept. Doritos x COD was never really about winning a trip to Boston; it was about every single visit earning something, with the trip sitting as the spike at the top of a curve where everyone had already walked away rewarded.
After Action Report
A lot of brand activations are designed for the deck; big visuals, a headline-grabbing prize, clean photography. Most of them don’t survive contact with ground level, because the people who’d actually walk up to the booth were never part of the design conversation.
This one worked because the writing got built around what the audience already knew, what they’d notice, and what they’d find funny; the dust on their fingers, the sniper laser meaning something specific, the streamer being someone they trusted long before we hired him, the supply drop reading instantly without a word of explanation.
If there’s a portable lesson in it, it’s that experiential copy is mostly an exercise in vocabulary discipline. Pick the world you’re in, learn its language, and don’t break the frame for anything.
The T.A.C.C. is still my favourite line in the whole campaign, because it’s the one piece of the booth that does its job whether anyone reads the rest of the deck or not.
Project: Doritos x Call of Duty at Gamers8
Role: Concept, Copy, Naming, Activation Mechanics, Prize Architecture, Bilingual Messaging
Year: 2023
Agency: Mindspace
Client: PepsiCo / Doritos