'We Didn't Want This to Make Sense': Advertising Halo 2

Electronic Gaming Business, Nov 3, 2004

Okay, all props to mighty Redmond for nabbing a record-smashing 1.5 million pre-orders for this week's release of Halo 2, but you have to admit that advertising this sequel to a salivating audience of 5 million Halo owners can't be the steepest marketing hill to climb. "I think advertising had a role in it, but to tell you the truth the game speaks for itself," says Brian Rekasis, global advertising lead, Xbox and Microsoft Game Studios, who helped mastermind a media campaign that ventured outside the usual game promotion channels and onto prime time network TV spots and even movie theater trailers. In its most costly game advertising campaign to date, Microsoft is trying to move games marketing more firmly into the realm of mass media campaigning.

About two-thirds of the Halo 2 advertising budget is going to big media, cable and network TV spots, in addition to the in-theater trailer of last summer. About 15% of the spend is online, but only a relatively modest 15% is allocated to print. "I was really trying to break out of where you expect to see gaming ads," Rekasis says. "We didn't want this to make sense. We wanted people to say, 'What's going on? Why is there a game ad among other products in the World Series?' " Microsoft had purchased a slot for the fifth game that never occurred, so Fox is arranging some replacement prime time slots for the Halo 2 ad.

"Early on, we knew we wanted to market this game as if it were a blockbuster Hollywood entertainment," says Rekasis, and the marketing team at Microsoft specifically researched how filmmakers promote their most anticipated titles six months before release. Like any Christmas film release, Halo 2 advertising began last summer with print teasers and the first in-theater movie trailer for a game, which ran before some of the summer's biggest film releases.

The trick in going mass market is the messaging, says Rekasis. The Halo 2 trailer was driven by story and character rather than by gameplay. The game's theme of the alien Covenant race discovering Earth would be immediately recognizable and compelling to a non-gaming audience, and so "Earth will never be the same," became the cryptic tagline for much of a mass market campaign that deliberately hid more about Halo 2 than it actually revealed. "We didn't have a lot of gratuitous violence. You can go overboard with games, so we [only] gave flash sequences of game footage."

While he wouldn't talk pricing, Rekasis says that in-theater trailers are not prohibitively priced for the games market because many chains such as Regal now distribute digital trailers to all of their theaters, which spares the games advertiser from having to make and distribute very costly film versions for every screen.

By emphasizing story and character over game play, but also avoiding the usual leaden depictions of game play, the trailer and much of the mass market strategy was aimed at teasing interest outside of the core and stoking anticipation among Halo fans. "What we wanted to happen was those who were not familiar with gaming to say, 'What was that?' and the gamer to be empowered and say, 'Let me tell you about it.' "

Energizing the Base

While spreading the Halo gospel to new audiences was major campaign goal, keeping the hardcore fans happy was just as important since, "we owe everything to them," says Rekasis. The online campaign employed more detailed massaging that emphasized the game's sci-fi elements and teased gamers about how little work they would get done once the game was released. Most of all, Rekasis says, the challenge was to keep the game trailers fresh, with elements the hardcore fan had never seen before, because these players download and scrutinize every frame. "We wanted to make sure they weren't let down."

Indeed, Microsoft and its online agency, AKQA, took the daring step of turning the Halo2.com site itself into a game by converting it entirely to an AKQA-created Covenant language. The concept ignited the game's blogosphere, which succeeded in cracking the code within 24 hours, according to AKQA, and attracted 140,000 unique visitors in a single weekend.

Rekasis admits that launching such a far-reaching, often cryptic, and expensive media campaign across so many platforms defies easy ROI calculations. "I do have discussions about ROI with the product marketing managers. It's very difficult to measure and evaluate our success to metrics that aren't tied directly to sales." They can perform post-exposure studies to gauge purchase intent and message takeaways among consumers who see the ads, but Rekasis says he also looks to his peers to see how the messaging is being evaluated in trade pubs such as Ad Age and also relies on message boards to track effectiveness.

But this is the game that game makers will have to play in the future. Rekasis says that after many false starts at becoming a mass medium, "It feels like it's really happening this time. Gaming is having a resurgence and Hollywood is taking notice." At least one thing will not miss Hollywood's notice; with 1.5 million pre-orders, Halo 2 is already guaranteed to generate more revenue on its release day (at least $75 million) than first-day box office receipts of any film in history. Earth may never be the same.