Squadvertiser. It’s Halo meets HR. Rather than advertising Halo, Xbox launched an interactive tool that let teams advertise for new teammates. With Squadvertiser they could create customised recruitment ads, specifying precisely the candidate they were targeting. These ran as billboards, banners and print to get teams’ needs in front of a wide audience of potential recruits.
Campaign Success
Squadvertiser consisted of two main sections.
One section was an ad creator, which allowed teams in need of new players to create customized recruitment ads, which could then be shared on social platforms or be distributed on Xbox’s own media spaces, such as billboards, banners, magazine and newspaper ads.
The other section was a job board, on which unemployed players could search for Halo jobs matching their skill sets, and then apply directly to the team.
Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results
For the first time, Halo gamers could ‘hire’ who they wanted, forming lasting friendships in the process, leading to more Halo being played.
Squadvertiser is used by 9000 gamers daily
Ads have a 17% response rate
Halo 5 became the most-played game on Xbox Live
Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service
Rather than us promoting Halo, Squadvertiser let gamers promote themselves, and in so doing they promoted Halo for us.
Squadvertiser brought the Halo brand to life by taking it out of the digital world and into the real world. It used the real world solution of putting gamers’ recruitment ads onto Xbox’s banners, billboards posters etc. as a means of solving what was essentially an HR problem in video games.
The issue at hand was that the target audience was faced with an unsatisfactory multiplayer experience.
So rather than advertise the product (Halo), our strategic approach was to create something that would make the product better.