E3 vs PR – Part I: XBox One – How Microsoft let their key moment get ‘xboned’
Welcome to E3 vs PR – A blog series on the Gaming Industry’s Most Important Season from a Communications Perspective.
You’re having a bad PR week with the media if you’re one of the following two clients:
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, following allegations of crack-cocaine use caught on tape, or, Microsoft’s Games and Entertainment Division, following the incredibly confused and poorly communicated debut of their next generation platform, the Xbox One (XBO).
I’m a gamer. Have been since I was 3. I’m also an upcoming communications and PR graduate. The lens I’m looking at this industry through is changing radically, but the last week has been bad enough that the popular opinion is all on the same side.
We all threw our hands up at Microsoft’s lack of a coherent set of key messages throughout the eight days since launch. Everything we’ve been taught not to do, they’re doing.
While Microsoft didn’t match Ford and (allegedly) break the law over the last poorly-planned eight days of the XBO PR launch, you’d definitely call most of their actions criminal, from a communications perspective.
A game and entertainment console ‘reveal’ is one of the most critical and risk-laden PR events that can take place in the interactive entertainment industry. A console, like the XBO’s predecessor, the XBox 360, typically lives on the market for a healthy five to six years. That’s before being relegated to second-tier status upon its successor’s launch for the next three or four years.
So, you’ve gotta get the reveal right. It’s definitely the first impression, and it just can’t happen twice; Nintendo’s disastrous two-staged reveal of their Wii U platform in 2011 and 2012 proved just that.
In 2013, entertainment comes with a million strings attached; from digital rights management, to always-online connectivity, to personal security and privacy of one’s confidential information.
Any smart company’s job in that quagmire should be to get a plan in place for how they want to handle tricky issues, how to deliver core, key messages, and make sure that everyone that buys into their product gets straight to its key deliverable: in this case, fun. Games. Entertainment. With all the red tape and garbage on the way cut out.
Instead, what we received was, as the esteemed director of this pop culture blog put it, ‘policy spaghetti’. I’d call it uncooked spaghetti, flung against the wall into a quivering mess of rules and regs that no mainstream consumer could reasonably make sense of.
It was a jumble even to savvy industry followers, and doubly so to communications professionals in general.
I’m both and I can’t even understand where Microsoft and the XBO stand on several key issues.
A sensible communications plan for something as megalithic and important as a console reveal should have incorporated some of the following:
- Clear messaging in your initial public reveal.
- Holding back on announcing unbaked features until they’re well-defined.
- Strategic, scheduled rollouts of coordinated detail and information for all elements of the reveal, in all relevant channels: executive interviews, social media, news conferences and press releases.
What happened instead?
An erratic flood of often-contradictory details coming from all channels at once, all scooped up and laid out by the media. Kudos to the gaming media who generally reported just the facts over the last week, letting Microsoft’s confused messaging speak for itself.
And Microsoft’s response?
Well, they took a page from my city’s mayor, and blamed the media.
You can’t take some statements back MS; the web’s written in ink. And while you can hope that the signature fickle element in the gaming community will forget, comm. practitioners probably won’t.
E3, the industry’s flagship conference of ideas, debuts, products and networking is kicking off the week of June 10. The XBO reveal begins the spring E3 season with a ton of PR noise, good and bad. This blog series will be following the rest of the spring E3 developments, from the dual perspective of a diehard gamer (that’d be me!) and a new communications and PR graduate (that’d also be me).
Join me on the ride for the next six weeks, and sound off below if you want to make your voice heard!
Budrickton