With the strategic principle of “Know Your Enemy” as our north star, we built out a campaign where every experience, activation, and video showcased how a strategic mind could overcome brute force. Through #TwitterHaloWars, we encouraged our audience to get to know their enemy by providing a social “training ground” that featured the game's diverse military forces, on both sides of the battle. We followed up the game with our video campaign, which sought to depict a strategic ‘War of Wits’ between the two main characters of Halo Wars 2 in fun real life scenarios.

Each piece of this campaign was built to be a completely digital and social push with our audience in mind. We kicked off the campaign with our #TwitterHaloWars program. Here fans of Halo and strategy games could both get a snapshot of the game’s new fast paced ‘Blitz Mode.’

When it came to our video content, we planned our production around all of the channels at our disposal. In addition to the long-form and traditional :30 & :15 second cutdowns, we scripted out vertical video executions that would be served up on SnapChat. We also wrote and produced :06 second YouTube bumper ads to take advantage of the new super-short ad placements. These were targeted at viewers of our long-form spots and came with a quick joke and hard-hitting call to action later in the campaign to keep the game top of mind on launch day and beyond.

The #TwitterHaloWars activation was a hit. Within the first 9 days alone, the game was played over 56,000 times with a 96% average completion rate. We even saw YouTube gaming channels reviewing the experience and creating walkthroughs of our gamified DM program.

The ‘War of Wits’ videos also made a huge splash in the gaming community, with the long-form videos bolstering over 20 million views on YouTube alone and over 100 million digital video impressions across all channels.