Xbox 360 Bronze Apg Paper 2007

Before you’ve even begun reading this, your expectations have been raised. Not because of the way this paper has been presented. Not because of the font we’ve used, the binding we’ve chosen to wrap it all up in, nor the reputation of the agency that has sent it to you. It’s because it’s Xbox. And with Xbox, you have to do something special. This is how, with good planning, we did.

Easter Egg for Xbox 360 is a great example of how planning not only informed an idea, but made it work. As a discipline, it was a guiding hand from brand strategy through channel strategy through creative development through execution through evaluation.

By including planning as part of the creative development process we allowed insight to challenge the original brief, target two audiences for the price of one and create the first fully participative TV advertising.

From a communications perspective planning this campaign used the interruptive nature of TV advertising to reach a broad audience whilst creating a permission marketing approach to engage a non TV audience with TV advertising.

Planning insight meant the campaign could engage the different audiences by understanding the strengths of different channels. The strategy and creative idea then evolved together, towards the same end.

Never before has an Easter Egg been put into a TV spot, or online been used to drive people to it.

This is what Easter Egg did. Not only was it highly effective, in terms of reach and effect, it was also rewarded with two entries in the book, a pencil nomination and a lot of smiles from our client.

This is how we did it:

Xbox 360 combines high-definition wireless gameplay, 5.1 surround sound with interactivity between other digital devices (MP3 players, iPods, digital cameras) and streaming from Windows Media Centre Edition PCs.

As a Digital TV agency, Weapon7 were appointed by Microsoft and their media agency Universal McCann to develop a strategy and campaign for the launch of X Box 360. The first “next generation” games console, the Xbox 360 was the console launch of the year. Widely anticipated by the press, the industry and consumers, it took place on December 1st 2005.

A key tenet of Xbox’s marketing is that it be best in class, truly innovative and must excite and engage an advertising-savvy, marketing-weary audience.

Digital TV advertising had to live up to its promise.

The initial briefing suggested that we could use interactive TV to show game trailers via a menu just as the competition had done before. This wouldn’t be enough, we decided.

Planning then had to identify the role for Digital TV amongst the various target segments.

Two were identified for whom the Xbox 360 proposition would be most appealing: hardcore gamers and those for which gaming was just one of the many forms of digital entertainment they enjoyed. The hardcore, we’ll call Gamers, and the less hardcore, we’ll call Players.

To get under their skin we started by looking at their media habits.

The key insight came from Mediainmind, a study from UM. It asks the question ‘Have you felt more favourable for a brand after having seen an advertising message using this communication channel?’

When compared to the population, an interesting pattern emerged.

As you might expect, both groups over indexed on the internet. However, when we looked at the other channels that performed well, we could see that the Players were responsive to types of media that you could say were interruptive (TV, Radio, Bus sides, Gondola Ends) whilst the Gamers rejected these type of media and were more responsive to programme and event sponsorship, product placement and posters outside shops.

These channels could be thought of as media that brings a benefit to the consumer; media which they choose to participate in because they are useful. At face value, TV under indexed amongst this gamer group, but of course they were responding with traditional TV advertising in mind.

So now we had two audiences with very different relationships with TV advertising.

Previously, we had spent a good deal of time analyzing interactive TV campaigns to understand how they work. A cornerstone of this work was undertaken with Mike Hall which led us jointly to develop a model describing the way in which digital TV advertising worked on the viewer and the stages that they go through when interacting with a TV spot. We went back to this work to understand how the model may apply to each of our targets.

A property of Digital TV is that it allows advertisers to utilize a permission marketing approach versus the more traditional interrupt & repeat model. If viewers press the red button they are actively asking for content because they assume it will be of some value to them; they are tempted to press red by the lure of information, incentive (content or reward) or intrigue.

Additionally, when we advertise on the Sky platform, it is listed on the Sky Active a-z, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Think of this as our own mini TV channel for the duration of the campaign. This means that people can get to the advertising whenever they like, so word of mouth can have a huge effect on participation rates.

To some extent, the job for Xbox 360 was done amongst Gamers. We knew from talking to them that they had an excellent awareness of the offering, as they were keenly following the discourse about the console and games online. This meant that the primary audience for advertising was the Players. However, Players don’t make a console choice without asking around. Everyone knows a Gamer so ideally we would want our communication to appeal to Players and Gamers alike. Players wanted to know more about the console, the games and the functionality; Gamers didn’t need to know more but could be engaged in something cool. Players responded to TV but Gamers rejected interruptive advertising. It was an impossible task. For our digital TV advertising to be successful it had to be credible to Gamers.

This led us to thinking about TV advertising in a different way. Could we create advertising which could be actively sought out by this hard to impress Gamer segment?

We had to set ourselves the challenge of creating advertising which would be effective amongst two groups with different communication needs and different relationships with TV. We needed to create something with Style and Substance; Aspirational lust and Product proof; Brand desirability and next generation gaming credibility.

As we’ve mentioned, Planning & Creative make up our team for conceptual work at Weapon7. This means no formal briefing, as the two disciplines work from strategy through development through execution. This way, we worked out what needed to be done amongst the Players from the segmentation study very quickly. We needed to excite them - they wanted to know about the games, the features, the sound and music and the HD. The real question was how to engage the Gamers who already knew it all.

We spent some time talking to and watching Gamers play. Two key things emerged. They liked a challenge and they liked to be in the know. The first point is obvious as most games are indeed challenges which need to be mastered to progress through the levels. The second point, being in the know, can be seen with popularity of cheats and Easter Eggs. The hidden elements in games which act as a kind of currency. When you find out about one of these Easter Eggs you have something to share with fellow gamers. They act as fuel, stimulating word of mouth.

Here was our answer. We needed to produce advertising which at first sight was targeting Players with the information they needed in an exciting way. But we would give the advertising hidden depths. We needed to create something where there was more for gamers to discover.

We knew that online was an important touchpoint for both groups. Now we had the opportunity to use the power of TV and the power of online simultaneously to create a campaign which brought together two audiences and two different channels.

A number of our campaigns have been evaluated through a methodology we’ve developed with 2CV research called Interactive Communication Effectiveness. This has provided us with insights as to how similar content consumed in analogue form, on digital TV and online can have a different effect. We see that TV has a status, authority and endures whereas online is more ‘of the people’, easy to participate with and more disposable.

This helped us to identify the roles for each channel within the overall communication objectives.

We would utilise the online channel to carry a discourse about the challenge we would hide in the interactive TV ad.

We would drive participation not just from the red button on the TV spots but also by people going to the Sky Active a-z. In this way we could encourage the Gamers to engage in our digital TV advertising when they might not otherwise have seen a TV spot.

We wanted the challenge itself to resonate with Gamers to build the credibility of Xbox 360 and demonstrate that it was a brand for people who truly loved gaming. This would also serve to drive positive feedback from Gamers to Players whenever their opinion was asked.

In-game HD footage was the best way to demonstrate the games. We cut together a selection of gaming clips to a high energy sound track. Flashed over this were the key features in a near subliminal way. Amongst these flashes the attentive viewer may notice the word EGG.

On entering EGG on their remote control the Gamer reached the next level and so on until the final clue required the date that the first Easter Egg was put into a game (it was in 1980 by Warren Robinett in a game called Adventure). The first seven successful Gamers were greeted by Jay Allard, President of Xbox and entered their names to appear on a leader board.

The very first Gamer to crack the Easter Egg also appeared on the front of the Ad.

For those who just viewed the ad, there was a message as they left informing them of the level they had achieved.

This left them wondering what they had missed and led them to the discussion forums online. Online gamers shared clues and helped each other out. This was fuelled by a handful of Gamer ‘connectors’ identified by Digital Outlook and Weapon7. It was this interplay between online and Digital TV which drove participation to the record levels achieved.

But of course planning’s contribution didn’t stop there. Any campaign in a lesser known medium needs to be proven. Effectiveness was measured in two ways. Reach was measured

via Continental Research on an Omnimas study. An average Interactive TV campaign could reach 300-500k people as measured by this approach. Communication effectiveness was measured via a pre and post tracking study through Hall & Partners.

The headline story are:

An astonishing 1.9 million viewers interacted One fifth of those who interacted did so after being told about it by a friend A third then went on to tell others about it +15% top box purchase propensity + 35% increase in top box brand advocacy

Consoles sold out within 7 days

Game over.

Thank you for playing.