Report: Halo: Reach To Have Microsoft's Biggest Game Marketing Campaign

The campaign behind Bungie's upcoming Xbox 360 game Halo: Reach will be the biggest game campaign in Microsoft's history, Xbox global product manager Michael Stout said in an Ad Age report. Working on the campaign are two agencies that organized the award-winning Halo 3 campaign, AKQA and The Interpublic Group of Companies' AgencyTwoFifteen. The new Halo is due in September this year. Microsoft said that following Halo 3's September 2007 launch, the game generated $300 million in worldwide sales in week one. The company also said that the Bungie-developed game sold 8.1 million units through the end of 2007. Scott Duchon of AgencyTwoFifteen said that the campaign for Halo: Reach -- the final Bungie-developed game in the series -- will take a "different approach altogether" from previous Halo efforts. "We're not looking at it as trying to top what we've done," he said. "But we're trying to find a new way to find success for Halo. How do you market the story before Master Chief? We approach it as a particular story that needs to be told, not the franchise." Xbox director of global marketing communications Taylor Smith suggested that the campaign would make the Halo world accessible to a wider span of consumers. "You don't have to know anything before going into it," he said. "We're trying to tell the story in broad strokes and universal themes that people know all around the world. And get our core fans even doubly excited." Smith added that the use of live action in advertising -- which Halo marketers have implemented before with positive response -- will make a return for Reach. "We're trying to get people to connect back to their lives, not computer graphics or something overly sci-fi. Live action is a way to capture that." Earlier this year, Microsoft community director Brian Jarrard said that consumers should "expect to see a lot more grandiose marketing efforts [with Halo: Reach]; things will be at a much higher scale than they were for [September 2009's Halo 3] ODST."