Bungie

Ensuring success in the most competitive entertainment category demands more than visibility. It requires cultural fluency, speed, and an ability to unify the brand’s many touchpoints into one living brand universe. Together with Bungie’s internal teams and Eidra’s expertise across technology, engineering and physical production, Kurppa Hosk took on the role of lead creative agency for Marathon’s marketing campaign — supporting the strategic and aesthetic vision for the brand and marketing, as well as orchestrating how it would reach and engage with global audiences.

In close collaboration with Bungie’s publishing team, Kurppa Hosk established the expressions of the Marathon brand and led the activation of the integrated 360 go-to-market plan spanning paid media, owned platforms, social, community environments, creators, and experiential moments.

The result was not a campaign, but an immersive, interconnected ecosystem — collapsing the boundaries between marketing, world-building, and community into one cohesive experience. Every engagement added dimension: content expanded the world, communities gave it a voice, and digital touchpoints made it tangible.

By expanding the game beyond itself, Kurppa Hosk established a new benchmark for the category: creating a living system where brand, world, and community inspire and influence one another, and evolve together, ultimately scaling into culture.

AAA titles unfold over years, and throughout that journey Kurppa Hosk supported Bungie through multiple defining phases — starting with creative ideation in 2021 to collaborating on the full marketing campaign roadmap and activations through launch in 2026.

Shifting market dynamics, changing player expectations, and direct community feedback demanded continuous recalibration. In gaming — where brand and product are inseparable — market insights mean revisiting the marketing strategy at its core, and iterating in lockstep as the development of the game progressed. This involved defining a creative platform and robust communications ecosystem to power the global marketing campaign and corresponding worldbuilding. And, simultaneously scaling the team to deliver the right strategic results at the right moments — starting from a core team of 10 to over 40 cross‑disciplinary collaborators by launch.

Central to the campaign was a brand-led product marketing approach, one that honored the legacy of the original IP while actively inviting new audiences in. A deliberate, fan‑centered strategy was developed to build affinity within key audiences — empowering fans and creators to champion the brand, its lore, and its evolving identity in ways that felt authentic and earned. As a result, fans played a critical role in the marketing engine, helping raise broader awareness and welcoming new players into the fold.

The campaign kicked off with a gameplay reveal in 2025, amplified by a series of experiential and interactive activations as part of an ambitious ARG (Alternate Reality Game). A recurring element in Bungie’s marketing over the years, an ARG is an interactive experience inspired by the in‑game narrative, using the real world as a storytelling platform.

This kind of product-led edutainment helped reach wider audiences, building a relationship between players and the brand before they had access to the game itself. Through always-on social content spearheaded by in-game capture, groundbreaking use of community platforms, innovative merchandise and creator marketing to fuel the hype — building the go‑to‑market in a uniquely holistic and audience-informed way, from first reveal to global launch in 2026.

From a product development perspective, the launch of a game is a major milestone, but not the endgame. It marks the beginning of an ongoing dialogue with its community. For the brand, it is the beginning of a journey, when an IP proves it can transcend release and become something larger: a culture-creating force capable of shaping both its audience and the industry around it.

With the launch of Marathon, storytelling shifts to include players. And with that shift, Kurppa Hosk’s role evolves too — from defining and introducing the universe to growing it alongside the community. The main objective is no longer only to generate momentum, but to sustain a living ecosystem where brand, product, and player culture continuously inform one another. Kurppa Hosk’s continued focus is to help cultivate that exchange, ensuring Marathon develops beyond launch into a dynamic, player‑driven universe that both shapes and contributes to culture.