A Look At Halo 3's $10 Million Ad Campaign

Via Next Generation, a post on the Brand Week website that goes into some detail on the massive advertising campaign for Halo 3 orchestrated by Microsoft and the McCann-Erickson group. "The goal of the campaign is to bring Halo fans and nonfans up-to-speed as to where we are in Master Chief's epic battle to defeat the evil Covenant. While most major game titles begin their ad campaigns weeks before launch to build buzz, Halo 3 differs greatly. This mass-market push is actually the end of the of Halo 3 campaign. The TV push is the grand finale of a five-pronged attack Microsoft quietly launched last December. The carefully orchestrated onslaught was designed to make casual fans interested and core fans rabid as Microsoft aims to eclipse Halo 2's record-breaking $125 million in sales on day one. To date, Halo 3 is already on the books for one million preorders and counting. "

Comments

Redundant.

[Seumas]

A $10m ad campaign for Halo 3?

Isn't that like having a multi-million dollar campaign to let everyone know the sky is blue?

Re:Redundant.

[MyLongNickName]

What is this 'Halo'?

Re:Redundant.

[Applekid]

So grandparent first post is redundant and parent post is a troll? Yipes.

Can I meta-moderate again today, please?

Re:Redundant.

[king-manic]

A $10m ad campaign for Halo 3?

Isn't that like having a multi-million dollar campaign to let everyone know the sky is blue?

You know the Apple switcher ads? My thoughts on them are that they aren't to entice people to come to apple as they are so ridiculously silly as anyone who would switch would likely return the box because it didn't come with windows. The ads however comically play to What Apples user base already thinks. It re-enforces brand value in the people who already reside in the apple camp. So its not a ad campaign seeking new customers but re-enforcing value in current customers.

Ditto with the Halo 3 ad campaign. It re-enforces the value of peoples purchase. Saying "hey you bought a winner."

Halo 3

[CrazyJim1]

Playing this game will fix dead Xbox 360s.

Re:Halo 3

[G Fab]

You know, PC gaming isn't the hallmark of ease and reliability either.

360s have the best games. The best online content. And the worst reliability. It's also the most expensive console (this is an opinion, but I've certainly spent more on my 360 than my PS3 without counting games).

The idea that a buyer of one console is a loser because he values the games over reliability (or he made a mistake in choice) is just ludicrous. Thank God every car is not a Honda Accord. We need variety even at the expense of perfection. Your desire to see one platform destroy the others as evinced by demonizing people who have different preferences is just pathetic.

People who treat other people unfairly, hurt people, who lie, etc... are losers. People who work hard and come home to play a game they personally wanted are what makes the world fun. This weird fanboy fight thing reflects on you, not on the people enjoying their products. But for the 360 the PS3 would be crap and vice versa. But for the PS2, there would be no Wii. But for the N64 the PS1 would not have been so full of variety. You should love the fact that people are buying the 360, even if you play a different platform. Even PCs benefit a hell of a lot from console gaming.

The Nintendo is full of rehashed titles (done very well for the most part), Sony isn't full of rehashed titles but I really wish it were (GT:5 MGS:4 FFXIII will all be the best games on that system).

It's call refinement. You improve as you redo.

Force multiplier

[Chris Burke]

One of the best things about a $10 million ad campaign is that you can get news agencies/blogs/teh intarweb to discuss the advertising campaign itself, which is automatically advertising for the product the ad campaign is promoting that doesn't come out of that $10 million.

Advertisers are sort of like Satan. I hate them for their unmitigated evil, but I do sometimes have to admire their savvy.

Re:Force multiplier

[_Sprocket_]

Advertisers are sort of like Satan. I hate them for their unmitigated evil, but I do sometimes have to admire their savvy. I have a guilty pleasure of studying advertising. I equate it to studying infosec attack methods. I'm not inclined to be involved in hacking random public targets (whether that target is a system or human nature) in such a manner. But I do find the techniques fascinating. And it helps to understand some aspects of the world around me - and protect myself from said techniques.

10 million profit?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

How much are you expecting to make back if you spend this much on advertising?

All Halo 3 needed was a trailer every couple of months, a place holder website and to let magazine/online previewers play "demos" of areas every so often and it would still sell as well as it will now. It's like advertising toilet paper when you're the only people on Earth who makes it, why would you spend good money on such stupidity?

Re:10 million profit?

[archen]

Simply put, because it's an exclusive for a console. There isn't much to really discuss if it's on all consoles. Even if it's on one first, many if not MOST people have the patience to wait for a while. But it's different with an exclusive and a huge franchise one at that. The more you can get people hyped about it and talking and excited, the more buzz is generated around the console. Maybe those who got a PS3 are thinking that they'd like to play that awesome Halo game too. Perhaps thinking about buying a new console you'd consider a Xbox360 first since everyone is talking about Halo, and you only get that on the 360.

Honestly I think 10 million on such a campaign is ridiculous, but this is probably proof that gaming is big business now - with nearly as much weight as the movie and music industries.

Re:How much?

[Applekid]

How much was Bioshock's advertising campaign? Clearly not enough to get a story about how much advertising they spent.

Math time

[Plocmstart]

$10 million ad campaign... 1 million preorders... so roughly $10 of your $60 preorder goes to advertise what you're already buying. They should have skipped the advertising and lowered the price.

Re:Math time

[ajanp]

If you wanna turn it into a little more fuzzy math, then you can consider that they are likely going to sell more than just the pre-orders on Day 1 alone bringing a one day total close to, if not greater than, the previous high of $125 million in sales in a single day.

Not to mention this game is practically a part of pop-culture at this point (CMN.. it's been on /. like five or six times already)... point being that the sales are going to continue being strong even after the first day... atleast enough to make the 1/6 ratio you mentioned above significantly different.

And to add to the fuzziness... Halo 3 is also a console-selling game... they are spending 10 million in marketing to sell a game that will also sell a console. Assuming the marketing is done even remotely right (and seriously... the game sells itself... MSFT bashing aside... they could screw it up and it still won't hurt sales too much at this point), then they are likely to have an increase in console sales. People who were on the line about getting a second console (basically people who bought a wii) or getting their first console might be convinced that this is the time to get a 360. Either way, Halo3 is a big enough title that it's going to sell both a large volume in the game itself, but it will also boost sales for the Xbox 360 console for an extended period of time (including Christmas time at which point all stores will be fully stocked with both the console and the game)... and... well... that makes the prediction/fuzziness/math even harder to pinpoint.

Considering how strong the competition is and the fact that they will undoubtedly make a strong profit margin on this game, spending 10 million to promote it seems perfectly fine considering more money on advertising will eat away at people's willpower (to buy both the game and the console) much more than a $10 price cut would.

Concept of 'evil' is alive and well on Slashdot...

[mattgreen]

Take any technology story and you will see the terms 'evil' and 'good' bandied about as if they had any actual meaning in a discussion of technology.

So are you saying that Slashdot is inhabited by 5 year-olds now? That seems a bit harsh. Usually it is best to cloak those sorts of remarks in more erudite terms and lace your posts with enough sarcasm such that they get modded funny. :)

Re:Marketing Over Substance

[Pojut]

Normally I don't feed trolls, but I'm bored at work...

Microsoft is mocking the gaming industry with their Halo 3 marketing campaign.

  I don't think they are mocking people...it may be stupid of them, but hey if they want to blow that much money on marketing a game that really needs no marketing, let em.

They are essentially telling the gaming world we don't even need a decent game to sell millions.

Games don't sell millions if they aren't at LEAST decent...

If you take away the fact that Halo is Microsoft only real exclusive franchise of any significance you are left with an incredibly mediocre set of games that have lived of massive hype and little substance.

Right, because Sony has never had a title with massive hype and little substance.

Graphically the Halo games have never been very good relative to other fps on all other platforms. The Halo games appeal to the fairly niche crowd of US PC gamers who think the pinnacle of graphics is making things look shiny. Shiny metal everywhere 24/7/365 appears to be the Bungie philosophy.

While I agree that comparitively Halo has never been the graphics champion, it most certainly does NOT appeal to PC gamers...in fact, ask most long-time PC FPS players and they will respond with things ranging from "halo sucks" to "it's decent but not really that special"

Now with Halo 3 they are easily at the bottom of the barrel graphically compared to all other games out in 2007. Halo 3 looks like Halo 2 with a bump up in resolution. The same silly shiny metal that most gamers stop being impressed with years ago once again is the focus.

Not really. Load up a couple of pictures of Halo 2, and then load up some pictures of Halo 3 on IGN...not pictures of the beta (because in the beta they WERE using Halo 2 models and textures), actual in-game shots of Halo 3 single player. Again, not the most fantastic graphics out there, but they still have quite detailed textures and some very nice looking particle effects going on. Then again, Halo's artwork never strived for "ultra-real".

While the rest of the gaming world has moved on to modern rendering techniques like skin, facial animation, hair, cloth and clothings, sweat for characters, Bungie remains stuck in last gen with a character that is conveniently completely covered in the cheap to render shiny metal suit.

Right, because when you are fighting in a futuristic war with lord knows what kind of weapons and radiation, you want to be wearing cloth and have skin exposed.

With games like Crysis and Killzone 2 out there right now Halo 3 makes all of those claims from developers about the 360 being nothing more than an Xbox 1.5 ring true.

Links? Quotes? Just look at the massive difference between Fight Night Round 3 on Xbox compared to on 360...

I guess when you have the ability to throw insane amounts of money at marketing you really don't need to bother making a decent piece of console hardware or even a game that is in the same graphical generation as the competition.

You keep talking about graphics...that does say quite a lot about you as a gamer. Ironically, it puts you in the same group as the very people you were railing against in the beginning of your post.

Just to preempt you, yes I am a fanboy. A fanboy of video games. I own an Atari 2600, NES/SNES/N64/Gamecube/Wii, GBA, Genesis, PS1/PS2/PS3, PSP, Dreamcast, Xbox/Xbox 360, and a respectable gaming PC.

Play as many games on as many different platforms as you can. Being a brand whore only limits what you as a gamer get to experience. But hey, that's your decision.

Too bad...