Advergaming y Halo 3

Microsoft aspira a vencer en la guerra de las consolas estas navidades gracias a Halo 3, un juego bastante sorprendente sobre el que la BBC muestra un avance.

En relación con Halo 3, parece que la campaña dará que hablar. Aquí os paso un artículo al respecto que he encontrado en Behindthebuzz

Games and software have been some of the most fertile areas when it comes to interactive marketing, extending a campaign beyond pure advertising. Halo 3, the third instalment of the XBox game, is no exception. Its predecessor, Halo2, was promoted through oneof the biggest ARGs to date, I Love Bees. A similar development appears to be in the works in the run up to the September release. Interestingly, this is not been done by 42 Entertainment but appears to be an internal programme to Bungie and Microsoft.

Campaign elements are slowly coming to light, lovingly documented over at thebruce’s wiki.

• Postings to online forums, emails to targeted people, websites (the Society of the Ancients), blogposts etc. All of these are pretty typical for the audience and genre. I’m amused by the fact that even a company that has done this before was not quite ready for the speed of things being discovered; reading through the timeline you can see that pages were not ready in time, but were made live pretty quickly. The website has a counter ticking down to Thursday, so expect things to happen then.


• Real world demonstrations. In New York’s Time Square (that first choice for all experiential agencies), London, San Francisco, Boston and Vancouver.


• FSI marketing materials. Both Circuit City and Best Buy flyers that circulated last week have imagery fromt he campaign, linking to an online comic which contained the clues to get to the website.


• PR. It’s 4 months until launch and the magazines are getting reviews and summaries.


• Cross marketing with the Zune. Not necessarily the most successful mp3 player, it looks like Microsoft is looking for an increase in sales by putting exclusive content on the device


• Incidental marketing. Subscription cards for XBox Live have images from the game.


• A deal to produce toys!

The real world stuff is extremely interesting to me and I’m expecting to see far more of it. Advertising materials that on the surface give one message but give another message to those who are looking for it. I would not be surprised to see further clues in TV, Print and OOH, as well as whatever is being planned for Thursday. Far different to the Court TV Mass approach, here the messages are more discrete.