September 24

Microsoft is learning

Halo 3 comes out in 2 days and the Halo commercial has been on and off for a couple of days now. It’s pretty sick in my view. The commercial reminds me of everyone’s favourite Gears of War commercial from Cannes in the way it has the cool tunes playing behind the sort of surreal looking video. The interesting part of this campaign is how they have integrated it with the rest of it. Everyone in advertising these days likes to toss around fancy terms like Integration or Engagement but Microsoft has taken Integration in a different direction.

For those of you not familiar with the campaign, the boys over at McCann-Erickson built a very intricate small scale model of a battle ground as the basis for their work. Both the TV and the Website use this model to great effect. Other than the model, there aren’t very many connections between the different mediums but they still seem connected; the proof of great integration.

The word on the street is that the gameplay is only 5 hours (ie. how long the single player part lasts if you were to play it straight through) which is a bit short. However, they also say that the multiplayer portion is mind boggling which will be enough to sell most fans on the idea of buying the game. And thanks to the leaked version of the game that dropped this past Friday and this video, we can assume that is an almost certainty.

But none the less the advertising will do its job and the game will sell out as soon as it is released. And since people buy Xboxes so they can play Halo, I don’t think they’ll mind its potential shortcomings.