I know, everyone is talking about it these day, but it’s just impossible not to comment on this giant marketing operation. The recent release of Halo 3 (the third and final title in the Halo series), the new Microsoft game explicity conceived to boost sagging Xbox 360 sales, is like a huge wave flooding the whole mediascape.

With thousands of shops that expressly opened at midnight to sell it (at not only game shops!), it’s no surprise that Halo 3 has earned more than $170m in its first 24 hours of commercial existence, more than was ever made at the box office by any movie in history.

What we’re talking here about is a $10 million five-stage publicity campaign that started 10 months ago.

The first public appearance of Halo 3 happened in 2006 when a trailer was aired during Monday Night Football on December 4, in front of 1.8 million in-target audience, subsequently furiously clicked on by over 4 million people on YouTube.

In May 2007, the secrets of Halo 3 were disclosed to a few thousands people who could enter a multiplayer beta version of the game. This was followed by a viral campaign, both online and offline, the latter taking the game on the streets of various cities around the world.

In July a second trailer, commonly nicknamed the “Vermin Trailer”, was released with cross-product promotions involving other brands like Pepsi, 7-Eleven and Burger King.

Here are some Halo factoids:

- There are 15 million hardcore Halo fans in the world
- 11 million people own Halo 1 or 2
- More than 1 million people pre-ordered Halo 3
- Developing Halo 3 took 3 years of work
- 600 everyday players were used to beta test Halo 3 at Bungies Studios
- 3000 hours of beta play were analyzed and used to fine-tune the game
- The day after the release several parts of Xbox Live collapsed due to massive traffic by Halo 3 players

Some of the gamers are getting upset about this seemingly never-ending promotional campaign, and although they love Halo, they consider this marketing effort to be overplayed to the point of being sickening.

But Microsoft’s successful marketing stunt shows the virtues of taking your time to develop the product to the point of perfection (unlike, say, what happened with Vista) while tingling the expectations of prospective users with multichannel promotional messages climaxing in the enormously anticipated final release. What Halo 3 is saying is that you don’t have to be fast to cater to consumers: take your time, slowly build anticipation, and they will come in droves.