Halo Wars 2 War of Wits
Xbox
Issue 43 | June 2017
Agency
215 McCann
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Scott Duchon Creative Director Neil Bruce Senior Art Director Alper Kologlu Copywriter Kyle Davis Executive Producer Brandon Romer Producer Sarah Sweeney
Production Team
Production Company Smuggler Director Randy Krallman
Other Credits
Director of Business Affairs Mary Beth Barney Business Director Peter Goldstein Account team Drew Porter, Kevin John, Armando Melendez Director of Strategy Brian Wakabayashi Brand Strategist Ryan Ouyoumjian
Date
February 2017
Background
Halo is a series of first-person shooter games managed by Microsoft Studios, which revolve around the inter-galactic struggle between humanity and an alliance of aliens calling themselves the Covenant.
‘Halo Wars 2’ was to be released in February 2017, a sequel to the 2009 video game ‘Halo Wars’ and the task was to raise awareness and drive sales.
Idea
The Halo franchise had never allowed its characters to be taken out of their fictional world before. But to promote ‘Halo Wars 2’, a real-time strategy game, they were persuaded to do just that.
The campaign imagined that the game’s two major characters, the alien giant General Atriox and the heroically human Captain Cutter, engaged in a war of wits... in relatable, real-life comedic situations.
Two films showed the two antagonists using their strategic military minds to fight it out over the ownership of an airplane armrest and the price of a used car. As strategy gamers would appreciate, the key to victory was: KNOW YOUR ENEMY.
The videos were in a variety of owned and paid channels (broadcast, online and social) with bespoke Snapchat and YouTube bumper executions to tease the films.
A real-life car dealership in one of the films arranged for General Atriox to be featured as a somewhat alarming employee on their actual website, further blurring the line between the sci-fi game, marketing, and real worlds.
Results
‘Halo Wars 2’ received positive feedback from the critics after launch.
Our Thoughts
I’m sure there will be those at 343 Industries and Creative Assembly, who developed the game, who will hate this. They would have spent months on end creating a plausible world in which Cutter and Atriox would face each other – only for some clever-dick advertising guy to want to take them out of that universe and plonk them in a second-hand car lot.
That’s what makes this idea brilliant. It’s sacrilegious. But gamers seemed to like it, partly because of the influencer campaign that ran in parallel with this - in the UK at any rate, where bloggers and vloggers were invited to sit in a control centre and fight the war live, their reactions broadcast live to fans.