How Rough Guides and Xbox tapped into the entertainment industry’s largest sector – gaming

The guidebook dedicated one comprehensive chapter to each world, with the chapters structured and written in the classic Rough Guides style – informed and irreverent – and illustrated with images from the game. The work won six Pencils, including three Yellow Pencils, two of which were in the Entertainment category. Here, McCann London’s Executive Creative Directors Sanjiv Mistry and Jamie Mietz talk about how they tapped into the entertainment industry’s largest sector.

“For a long time, branded entertainment has been synonymous with long-form video content,” explains Mistry. “It’s been the go-to approach when trying to create work that doesn’t interrupt as ads do, but rather lures people in with the promise of laughing, crying or learning. What we at McCann London learned from this project was that there’s value in resisting the temptation to make the idea focus on a single video asset, which is a possibility that this insight could easily have led to. So while we did make a tourist board-style video that showed off beautiful locations from within games, it was important to not stop there.”

To break through in the entertainment space, they recognised that gaming itself is a form of entertainment and decided to complement it rather than compete with it. “The Rough Guide to Xbox was a form of branded entertainment that worked in conjunction with games to enhance the experience of playing them, making the core form of entertainment (the gaming) take on a different meaning and purpose.”

McCann London recognised the universal human impulse to make something our own, and kept tabs on what’s happening in the margins of cultural phenomena to identify potential new openings and opportunities. 

“Our work on Xbox at McCann London has always aimed to explore the outer edges of gaming, to show its potential to connect with people beyond the obvious ways,” explains Mietz. “And so these developments led to our proposal that we could start speaking to new audiences by not focusing on action and gameplay, but rather by focusing on the beauty of the worlds and promoting games as a viable means of travel.”

Rough Guides, through the partnership with Xbox, “gained a sense of being at the very cutting edge of where the travel sector could evolve to”, while Xbox were able to tap into some well-established cultural authority, gaining “a sense of credibility for the gaming tourism concept from an expert in the travel industry.”

In the words of Mistry: “The very fact that the two brands come from different worlds is what made the collaboration interesting and noteworthy. Had there been some clear and obvious connection, the partnership would not have stood out as something worth talking and writing about. So that’s definitely something we will bear in mind for future partnership work – that it’s not enough for there to just be an alignment of values and/or audiences between the brands. There needs to be a ‘WTF element’ to it as well.”

Travel was stopped in its tracks by the pandemic, but our need to explore never went away. Gaming entertainment provided an escape for people trapped in their homes, and McCann London was well-positioned to tap into those audiences.

“This campaign began well before Covid hit (the Rough Guides book launched in January 2020),” says Mietz. “But over the course of 2020, as lockdowns occurred all over the world, we realised that gaming tourism could be one of the ways in which people, desperate to venture beyond their four walls, could continue scratching the travel itch.”

As explained by Mietz: “Sometimes, with new ideas like these, there’s an understandable tendency by agencies to micromanage every aspect of it, to keep a tight leash on every execution to avoid it straying off course. However, we learned that while it was important to remain involved, there’s also huge, outsized value in trusting experts. For instance, had we as the agency insisted on writing the whole Rough Guide to Xbox book ourselves, rather than trusting the expert travel writers at Rough Guides to do it, it would have considerably weakened the idea. The fact that it was written in the same tone of voice as other, ‘regular’ Rough Guides books, made all the difference in it being viewed as a genuine extension of their range.”

When the pandemic struck, McCann London “re-contacted press who we’d reached out to previously. Suddenly, those who a few months earlier struggled to see the potential application of gaming tourism, now ‘got it’, with the likes of Conde Nast Traveller going on to write glowingly about the concept and trend.”

The impact of the pandemic on consumer needs and interests was extreme. Nonetheless, the way that editors perceive the best way to speak to audiences is always evolving, while editorial strategies and calendars are themselves subject to house style and schedules. Don’t be afraid to remind the media of your project if it didn’t land the first time around.