Today, Xbox revealed a new marketing campaign titled “This Is an Xbox,” a strategy that focuses on calling various things that are not Xboxes Xboxes in an effort to… well, I hope not sell Xboxes.
This is all most briefly summed up by an energetic 30-second video that includes many objects, only one of which is an Xbox. See if you can figure out which one!
Senior Director of Xbox Marketing Craig McNary wrote of the campaign in a blog
This Is an Xbox invites people to play with Xbox across multiple devices and screens. It showcases the evolution of Xbox as a platform that extends across devices, with bold, iconic, fun visuals and a light-hearted tone.
(As an editor, I will respectfully stand aside on the capitalization choices here. OK, no I won’t: I would either have done “This Is An Xbox” or “This is an Xbox.” Anyway!)
The campaign includes branding on busses and billboards globally, partnerships with brands like Crocs and Porsche, and a merch store where you can buy clothing that says “This is not an Xbox” (true: it is clothing) and phone cases that say “This is an Xbox” (false: it is a phone.). There’s even a quiz that I find offensive as a person with an educational background, which marks you wrong if you correctly identify things that are clearly not Xboxes as not being Xboxes.
Obviously, I get what Xbox is doing here. The company has been moving away from being a console with exclusive games for a while now; as Luke wrote, “The past decade of Xbox's existence has been marked by a general impression the company has no strategy or clear idea what exactly it wants from video games.” Through its acquisitions of studios and companies, putting its games on other platforms, and its messy leaning in to subscription services and cloud gaming that make owning its console less essential (and, I’d argue, even make its subscription offerings less desirable), this new campaign is just the next phase of a clear evolution away from the idea that Xbox is best defined by being, well, a box. It’s not a bad strategy when you consider the Xbox’s sales numbers, and I’d even go so far as to say that anything that threatens to end the idea of the “console wars” once and for all should be considered a public service.
But it’s kinda weird, right? I am no marketing genius, despite owning a company, but my year of experience has taught me that brand recognition is important. And part of people being able to recognize my brand is clearly communicating what that brand is. I’m not sure that calling Meta headsets, Samsung TVs, and Amazon Fire Sticks “Xboxes” does quite what Microsoft thinks it does, given that those are already brands. If the purpose of a marketing campaign is to get me to buy something, I come away from this not exactly sure what I’m supposed to buy: another company’s TV? An ASUS handheld? Maybe this is best seen as a way for Microsoft to claim a stake in existing brands and say no, actually, these are my brands now, like that “Dressed To Kill” flags sketch.
All piss-taking aside, the campaign’s essential incoherence does coherently express the vibes around Xbox these days. It feels less like a sales pitch and more like the worst kind of captcha, but I won’t say that isn’t how being on the internet and also generally being alive feels these days, so maybe Xbox is just fully embracing the zeitgeist. Best of luck to all involved.
