Game On: Gaming Ads

The expansion of spots into super-charged game trailers with novel-length back story and CG to make a gamer’s jaw drop 20 levels is taking advertising into new territory.  Game on, says Joe Lancaster

If you grew up in, or can remember the 80s, you might recall the hysteria surrounding the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the console that ushered in a new era of gaming and the TV spots that introduced its games showed the world exactly what it was about to become addicted to. Shots of kids reading the Nintendo newsletter, glued to the TV screen pressing buttons on rectangular wired controllers and voice-over lines, such as “Your parents help you hook it up”, were designed not only to promote the games, but educate the public about what a console actually was.

Fast-forward 23 years and, while pretty much everybody in the developed world knows what a games console is, there’s still a need for ads that demonstrate the latest technology, such as movement detection hardware add-ons, Xbox Kinect and Sony PlayStation Move. However, when it comes to the ads for individual games, many of the current works feel like entertainment in their own right. 

The road to Dead Island

When did this explosion of creativity happen? Not overnight, according to Geoff Edwards and Mauro Alencar, partners and executive creative directors at DOJO, San Francisco. “We’re not sure there was ever really a revolution,” says Edwards. “Sure, there were amazing campaigns like PS2’s Double Life, Xbox’s early Play More and, of course, we have to include Halo 3 Believe in that group [of which he was one of the creative directors at McCann Erickson San Francisco] but that doesn’t make a revolution. Video game advertising didn’t have a 1984. Instead it had many breakthrough efforts that helped define the category and make it what it is today.”

The trailer for Dead Island that emerged in February this year is one of a new wave of game ads that resemble movie trailers. In fact, it was more like a short film than a commercial. No game footage was used. Instead CG-rendered scenes spliced together (half of them playing backwards) tell the horror story of a family holiday interrupted by hungry, rampaging zombies.

It may seem odd not to use game footage to advertise a game – like doing a car ad without the car, but it can be more powerful to leave it out, says Stuart Aitken, managing director at Axis Animation and director of the Dead Island trailer. “Sometimes a more traditionally linear narrative can convey certain messages better than an edited game-play trailer can. Particularly if you’re trying to give a deeper insight into the story or characters.” But the game isn’t even finished yet, and at the time of going to press, no release date was allocated. “The trailer was there to get the world interested in that project,” says Aitken. It worked. Within 48 hours it had become the number-one Twitter trend and fans were making and posting online re-edited versions where the action played forwards and in chronological order.

Living on a Preyer

The intention was the same for Prey 2’s teaser, which came out a few weeks later. “It had been a long time since the first Prey and we wanted to create talk about the game,” says Carl Corbitt, one of the trailer’s creative directors, along with Anja Duering at Goodness Mfg. It went one step further and not only avoided game footage, but was filmed in live action without a single character from the game appearing. Shot from the point of view of a young man filming with a hand-held camera on board a plane when it is attacked by aliens, the style and story are reminiscent of the film Cloverfield. “Instead of showing our bounty hunter killing aliens on day one of the campaign,” says Duering, “we wanted to add some mystery along with a link back to the original storyline. The fans of the first Prey remember seeing this plane crashing onto the sphere and this teaser trailer is their chance to see that side of the story.”

Using live action to advertise a product that features none isn’t a bad idea, according to DOJO’s Edwards and Alencar. “It allows us to connect with the game’s story on a deeper level and experience its characters in very real ways. For instance, when Superman first made his appearance on the big screen in 1978, director Richard Donner allowed us to really see a man fly. It was pure magic. The point is, it was another, more relatable way for fans to experience that character.”

Edwards knows a thing or two about finding new ways to experience a character from his work as co-creative director on the Halo 3: Believe spot at McCann Erickson San Francisco and T.A.G. It was an amazing, integrated digital campaign that celebrated the legend of the game’s protagonist, Master Chief. It included a fictional museum of humanity and a Rupert Sanders-directed online short that navigated a sprawling diorama featuring 900 figurines in a painstakingly detailed battle scene. It has since inspired a parody tribute in New Deal Studios’ Last Call trailer for EA’s Bulletstorm game. Believe wasn’t just an ad or just a campaign – it had written an entire history. Did people think they were mad? “Absolutely,” says Edwards. “People were definitely wondering what the hell Xbox was doing, but two things drove the decisions that were made: Our client’s goals to create the largest launch in entertainment history and the resulting creative strategy.”

Edwards remembers the nucleus that dictated the campaign’s direction being planning director Nigel Tribe’s idea of flipping the question from, ‘how do you market a computer game?’ to, ‘how do you honour a hero?’

“It started with a diorama, and every idea about the bigger notion of how heroes are honoured, stuck. Anything that felt like ‘conventional’ game advertising didn’t. The client’s desire to create the biggest ever launch in history led us to come up with ideas that reached a broader culture, not just core gamers. So that allowed us to approach this assignment more like the launch of a world event and less like a title launch,” he says.

Microsoft’s openness to a daring campaign paid off, as Halo 3 grossed $175m in its first weekend, eclipsing the takings of most major Hollywood films. With games being such a creative industry, it seems that clients should be open to brave ideas, but Edwards explains that, as always, it varies. “Surprisingly, it can be more challenging with game clients because the best games have good stories,” he says. “Our ‘secret sauce’ is to steer clear of trying to outshine those stories by connecting very closely to the story that the creators of the games are trying to tell, and building from that point.”

Executive creative director Tom Adams explains how Goodness Mfg took the same approach with the Prey 2 trailer. “With most entertainment messaging, the job of the creative is not to get in the way of the story. So that tends to lead you down the path of what can you add to the story to give it more tension or more relevance.”

Technology ups the game

As well as specific ads, other milestones that can be cited in the evolution of game advertising are the advancements in technology, explains Axis’ Aitken. “Six or seven years ago there was a much bigger gap between what we could do with pre-rendered CG and what the games teams could do with their engines, but that’s changed massively since the Xbox 360 and PS3.”

The closing of that gap led to controversy, with developers growing concerned that CG is usurping the gains made in their engine tech, which is a key part of their marketing message and hence they may want to ensure that the engine is being showcased, and with people accusing them of trying to pass off high-end CG as game-play footage. This has led to the supers that are now required to point out when non-game footage is being shown. But Aitken sees a positive in the strength of the new technology, with a future in using the developers’ platforms. “We’re now being asked to do more things where we’re not pre-rendering it, we’re actually doing it in the game engine.”

The future of games marketing

There’s no doubt that computer-game commercials have changed dramatically since those NES ads back in 1988, but according to DOJO’s vision for the future of the genre, there’s still a lot more to come, so watch this space. “The future of game ads won’t be ‘just an ad’. The future of game marketing is about an entire ecosystem that engages the audience with the game’s story, and does it in a variety of ways. It could be a novel. It could be an exhibition. It could be the invention of a product. It could be many things, including an ad. However, there’s no way anyone can predict a formula because we’re talking about organic storytelling that, just like the gaming industry itself, thrives on innovation.”