Travel adverts with their panoramic shots of vivid landscapes are incredibly persuasive.
Tourism groups worldwide use the beauty of landscape – the blue oceans, golden sunsets and luscious green forests – to encourage us to take a break and book that yearned-for holiday.
You may have heard of tourism groups like Visit Wales or Visit Dubai that promote the best of what the country has to offer, but what about Visit Xbox?
To celebrate the launch of Xbox One X Enhanced games and reach a wider audience, Xbox built an innovative new campaign around the idea of virtual travel.
Dubbed ‘a new kind of tourism,’ the new Visit Xbox experiential advert invites people to explore the magical and mysterious worlds within its games.
From ancient cities, to enchanted forests and even alien planets, this new type of tourism encourages players to get off the beaten track and explore the spectacular scenery available in Enhanced titles (all while still sitting on their sofa).
During the clever campaign, Xbox behaved in the same way as a travel agent, promoting its best in-game destinations, offering rich and immersive experiences to gamers and removing the usual action-packed content.
Supported with a website featuring locations, beautifully shot by in-game photographers, Xbox enabled gaming tourists to find their next destination with ease.
Downloadable postcards and wallpapers were available displaying breathtaking scenes, which were, in some cases, barely discernable from the real world. Xbox even created holiday-themed bundles for gaming-tourists to buy, enhancing the travel experience even further.
Michael Flatt, Global Gaming Marcom Lead for box said “With ‘Visit Xbox’ we want to inspire everyone to become a gaming tourist and explore breath-taking Xbox One X Enhanced worlds. Our campaign offers destinations from the past, present, and future; on our world and beyond. Together with the Xbox community, we will continue to find, curate, and capture the most beautiful locations in games.”
Taking it one step further, Xbox hosted live guided tours of Forza Horizon 4 (a racing game known for its breathtaking scenery) on an interactive streaming platform and onto billboards in Westfields, London. It also brought the campaign to life in a palpable form, with a guidebook to gaming worlds released by best-selling travel books, Rough Guides.
In the past we have seen brands gamifying campaigns to generate awareness, such as T.J. Maxx ‘s gamified pop-up installations or Sydney Water’s life sized snakes and ladders game. It is interesting to see Xbox, a gaming giant, reverse this trend and take the gaming out of games.