#HUNTTHETRUTH
JAY CHIAT AWARDS 2016
SUMMARY
What becomes of old heroes? How many
ways can they save the day before we
take them for granted? Halo is one of
the biggest franchises in video game
history. Since 2001, millions have
donned the armor to become the Master
Chief, the super soldier who saves
humanity from alien threats. 14 years
and 10 games later, gamers had begun
to grow weary of the Chief’s
adventures. The Chief needed a fresh
start. This is the story of that rebirth.
“You either die a hero, or you live
long enough to see yourself
become the villain."
- The Dark Knight (2008)
60%
BACKGROUND
To begin our hero’s journey, flashback to the Fall of 2007. Halo 3 grossed
$300 million in its first week, becoming the ‘biggest entertainment launch in
history’ (by dollars). Halo defined gaming.
Jump to 2015… the franchise released 7 titles since Halo 3. None quite
recaptured the same excitement levels. According to review site Metacritic,
the average user score for each title released since Halo 3 is 6 points lower
and Halo 4 scored 8 points lower. Xbox’s gamer market sizing projected that
over 50% of our sales would need to come from gamer segments who had
not yet played any Halo game. Furthermore, business intelligence showed
Halo loyalists would comprise only 10% of our market opportunity.
Complicating matters, Call of Duty became the de facto standard amongst a
new generation of gamers. Launching around the same time as Halo 5, Call
of Duty competed for the same share of wallet.
While Halo was once the king of the hill and had some remaining
fans, the bloom was definitely off the rose.
SOURCE OF SALES BY SEGMENT
50%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
10%
Source
Never Played
Halo of Sales
Halo Loyalist
CHALLENGE
We needed to increase anticipation for Halo 5.
When you were once the biggest video game in the world, you don’t lack
awareness. Relevance, however, is a whole different issue.
According to Nielsen, before our campaign kicked off, Halo 5 was only the
5th most anticipated game of the year. Historical data indicated that was
not high enough to hit our sales goals. Given Halo’s storied past, gamers
expected Halo 5 to offer the same old thing. The franchise hero, Master
Chief, overcoming impossible odds to beat the super villain to save all of
humanity. And Halo 5’s storyline wasn’t much different.
Excitement is life. With the most anticipated games retailing for $69.99 to
$99.99, only the games gamers are most excited about succeed. According
to purchase journey research, the average gamer buys just 7 titles a year
and “family and friends” are the most important source of information in
driving purchase consideration. If broad gamers were excited about other
games, their influence could keep others from buying Halo.
It became painstakingly clear, Halo couldn’t rest on its laurels.
OBJECTIVES
Our goal was clear.
Make Halo 5 the must have game of 2015 in order to drive sales.
But to do this, our objectives were as follows:
1. Increase anticipation for Halo 5
2. Needed to provoke gamers to talk about Halo
3. Increase excitement and purchase intent to generate higher sales than Halo 4
INSIGHT AND STRATEGY
Master Chief has always been the franchises beloved hero.
Halo’s biggest strength against other shooter games is its
storyline. Chief is victorious in the end. But Halo’s strongest
strength had become its weakness. We needed gamers to
rethink what to expect from Halo as well as the Master Chief.
We talked to a mix of Halo fans and shooter genre players to
uncover the best way to reinvigorate the franchise. Rather
than test ideas, we used co-creative exercises that gave
gamers a chance to ‘write the story’ within thematic areas
inspired by the game. While Halo 5, (sorry, spoiler alert) still
had Master Chief saving humanity from an all-powerful enemy,
it also introduced a new hero.
We needed to understand how to best leverage Halo’s new
character to drive interest.
Working with gamers, we uncovered something we called the Boba Fett
principle. Inspired by the Star Wars character, the principle states that
the degree a character is considered a badass is directly proportional
to the badass character he is pitted against. We learned putting Locke
in opposition to Master Chief, automatically made him a badass gamers
wanted to play as. So we created the hunter vs hunted dynamic
between Locke and Chief.
What’s powerful about the hunter/hunted relationship is it’s an open
ended question. Who would win in a fight? Would Spartan Locke be
Halo’s new hero? If so, where did that leave Master Chief? The ambiguity
it created caused gamers to question whether or not Master Chief was
still Halo’s hero.
Ambiguity lead to questions, questions lead to speculation, speculation
sparked reevaluation.
When Master Chief’s place in the story was suddenly threatened and
questioned, it touched a nerve. That’s when it hit us.
If you want to make an old hero feel new again, we didn’t need
talk, we needed arguments.
OUR INSIGHT
If you want to start a passionate
conversation, create questions.
OUR STRATEGY
In the struggle between the Hunter and the
Hunted, who is the hero and who is the villain?
We had a way to provoke gamers into talking about Halo and create the kind
of reactions that influences a broader gamer audience. This became truly
apparent when an audit of gamer generated content unearthed the fan
reaction video. A fan reaction video is a video, of a fan’s spontaneous
reaction to piece of content, that’s posted online for others to react to.
These videos became a north star for the kind of emotional reaction we
wanted from Halo fans. Because in gaming circles, excitement builds from
the core and emanates out. By provoking the faithful, the larger world of
gamers would feel their energy.
THE IDEA
Using ambiguity to create confusion. We would
create a campaign that would call into
question Halo fan’s beloved hero by
presenting a series of questions that
required them to #HuntTheTruth.
We started with a shot across the bow. A
provocative online teaser video questioning
Master Chief’s role within Halo 5.
The video displayed a single bullet shattering
the Master Chief’s iconic helmet. Knowing Halo
fans scrutinize every piece of content related
to Halo, we hid messages within our video. An
interactive layer allowed viewers to scrub the
video for hidden words like ‘Orphan’ and
‘Soldier’ and most shockingly ‘Traitor’
inscribed onto the bullet.
Then we dropped a bomb to provoke a strong
initial reaction from fans. We released two
different :60 films in the first and last
commercial breaks of The Walking Dead
season finale.
The films were mirror images of each other: in
one, the new hero Spartan Locke gets the
better of Master Chief and in the other, the
Chief prevails. Two heroes, two showdowns,
one big question mark. What was the truth?
Then a month before launch, we decided
to do the unthinkable.
We decided to kill Master Chief.
A :60 film seemingly answered fans’
biggest question: would Halo 5 be the end
of Chief?
After gamers watched the shocking film,
they were sent to an interactive site that
gathered all of the reactions to Chief’s
death and turned it into a visual
representation of his iconic helmet.
Gamers were encouraged to contribute
messages to honor their fallen hero.
Speculation shot through the roof as
gamers questioned whether this was
really the end of chief.
Right when gamers thought they had the
answer to what would take place in Halo 5,
we decided to bring Master Chief
back to life.
A :60 film presented an opposite
perspective that Master Chief had actually
survived but Spartan Locke was sent to
hunt him down.
The visualizer flipped from Chief’s helmet
to Locke’s helmet, a symbol that a hero
killed in action had become the villain.
The reality was the only way to know the
truth was to buy Halo 5.
SUCCESS
From announcement to launch, gamers
were taken on a wild ride of unexpected
twist and turns. Master Chief went from
being the franchise’s hero to a hero killed
in action to a hero turned potential villain.
All the while spurring fans on to question
their assumptions and hunt the truth. In
turn, Halo 5 went from just another game
in a long line of Halo games to being one of
the bestselling games of 2015.
After the first announcement beat in March
speculation drove purchase intent…
Then the launch beat in October continued our
momentum which led to the best Halo launch in history.
During the first week of April, the videos for #HUNTtheTRUTH earned
the #2 spot most talked about ads on television for all categories
(iSpot.TV real time tracking of online activity, week of April 10th, 2015).
We saw a 9% lift in purchase intent and a 26.5% lift in title anticipation.
We saw a 24% lift in title consideration and 42% lift in purchase intent
amongst all target gamer segments
Halo 5 was the biggest launch with $400 million in
sales beating all previous Halo launches and was the
fastest-selling Xbox one exclusive game to-date.
In a Nielsen gaming survey, Halo 5 jumped from #5 to
#1 most anticipated game in the month.
In just three days, Halo 5 became the bestselling game for the entire
month of October, a monumental feat given that Halo was competing
against other titles available on multiple gaming platforms.
The launch of Halo 5 led to Xbox one sales that were
81% higher than the same time last year and overtook
Playstation 4 as the bestselling console for the month
of October.
THANK YOU