Halo 3 “Believe” takes away two Grand Prix Cannes Lions

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The marketing idea needed to be big enough to matter to our broadest group; but feel genuine and authentic to our core. At the center of the Halo universe is a simple story focused on a hero, Master Chief. As his story unfolds through the trilogy, it is full of tales of bravery, duty, sacrifice, friendship, and selflessness. These themes are consistent with the qualities of real heroes and classic storytelling throughout history, they are universal and timeless – they speak to all of us.

On par with a drum-beating gorilla, Microsoft and its advertising agency McCann Worldgroup is sharing the glory by winning not one but two Grand Prix (better than Gold) awards at the prestigious Cannes Lions 2008 international advertising festival for the Halo 3 advertising campaign “Believe”. One was for film, and the other for integrated marketing. Considering the film category had over 4600 entries, this recognition is well deserved. Now we just need a similar campaign for Windows.

22 insightful thoughts

  1. The last line “Now we just need a similar campaign for Windows.” was also what I thought when I heard about this. But perhaps this will serve as a lesson to the rest of Microsoft’s marketers.

  2. as someone who also is into advertising. i think Halo 3 “Believe” campaign was the most ambitious and high profile Ad Campaign ever done for Video Game. it was truly beyond measures. a thing to behold are some of the printed ads from that campaign.

  3. Well congrats to them but the odd thing is the story in Halo is generally the weakest part of the game even some reviews (not overcome with hype) questioned why anyone would buy the game for it’s story. It’s major popularity and enduring success is down to it’s best in class multi-player not it’s shaky single player and story-line.

  4. Views on Halo 3 the game aside, the marketing campaign for it was nothing short of incredible. The film short made for it had so much effort put into it, and the Believe adverts were extremely powerful for something that was, at the end of the day, a game. I’d say the awards are well deserved.

  5. ‘All people needed to do was believe.’

    In a few years time I hope I don’t succumb to some ‘propaganda’ as the realism continues in the decades to come!

    At least we should see it coming after a future April Fools joke gets us all. 😛

  6. Along the lines of the GOW “Mad World” trailer, this campaign did a great job of standing out–and, as they point out in that video, of “changing the question.” That’s what a Vista marketing push needs to do. Yes, they could do cheap “I’m a Mac” “I’m a PC”-style rebuttals, but that’s letting Apple set the pace.

    I, for one, think it’s incredible that, worldwide, there are more Windows users than English speakers. And one of the upsides of monopoly is that I can log onto any Windows machine, localized into any language, and know what I’m doing. So maybe there’s something there. I don’t know.

  7. That’s why I find it interesting why Microsoft would abandon McCann and go to another agency for the multi hundred million dollar campaign Microsoft has set for Windows.

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