• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 15, 2016

Gamers may debate their loyalty to Master Chief vs. Spartan Locke in Halo 5, similar to Google and Microsoft. When it came to promoting the latest Xbox game Halo, Microsoft turned to YouTube, encouraging long-term fans to rethink what they knew about the game and spur interest among people who had not played before.

In October, Xbox hosted a six-hour live event streamed on YouTube for the launch of Halo 5: Guardians. The recently published case study on Think With Google takes a look at how this YouTube live stream helped Halo 5 break sales records.

While it's not often that marketers see Microsoft collaborate with Google or YouTube, the event featured pre-produced packages of YouTube stars and developers explaining different aspects of the game, as well as live feeds from supplementary Microsoft store launch events in New York and Los Angeles.

Xbox ran contextual and behavioral-targeting ads to reach potential viewers with TrueView and search ads. Fifteen different videos used in the TrueView campaign generated 32 million minutes of watch-time, according to the Google report.

Eight million people watched some portion of the live event, and of those, 700,000 watched it all. Overall, 1.14 million people have watched the full show live or after the fact, with 24 million views of TrueView promo videos. This helped Halo 5: Guardians became the No. 1 fastest-selling Xbox digital game, per Google data.