We built a WhatsApp bot for an EA Sports FC campaign that could only say one thing. 15K conversations, +23% sales.

Everyone wants their bot to be smarter. For this one, the brief was basically the opposite. Context: in January 2026, EA SPORTS FC 26 was free on Xbox for four days during Free Play Days. The goal was to get lapsed players off the old version and into the new one. Edelman, the agency running the campaign, came up with the idea of Toni Kroos personally inviting fans via a WhatsApp voice note. Our team at BotsCrew built and ran the conversational side. The entire flow: A fan taps a link on IG, TikTok, YouTube, X, or the campaign site WhatsApp opens with a pre-filled message about a friend “still playing the old game,” and the fan hits send The bot replies instantly with Kroos’s voice note (his real recording, not a synthetic voice) and one CTA Anything sent after that gets one fixed reply That’s it. The bot never joins groups. Every share comes from a real person forwarding the voice note. Then the fun part. None of the hard problems were about the conversation: About 10 days to build, 4 days live. There was no second chance. A broken day one would have cost a quarter of the campaign. Ban risk. WhatsApp can suspend a fresh Business number within minutes when volume spikes, which is exactly what a viral campaign is designed to cause. We flagged this to the client before kickoff, along with what we’d do if it happened. Bursty traffic with no warm-up. We ran stress and load tests against WhatsApp’s incoming message limits well before launch. On the day, the platform scaled to six instances and didn’t drop a single reply. Tracking. Each channel got its own Bitly deep link, so the click is logged before WhatsApp even opens. Voice-note delivery is confirmed via a tracked API call, and a second tracked link in the CTA shows who actually visited the landing page. We reused an existing platform running in production instead of building from scratch. That’s the main reason the build came in about 25% under the estimated effort, and the saved time went into analytics and launch coordination. Results: 15K unique conversations Up to ~40% conversion to the game +23% sales uplift 8.2M organic views across the campaign The glamorous part was a voice note from Toni Kroos. The rest were rate limits, load scripts, and a backup plan for WhatsApp flagging the number.