Report: Ex-Xbox president Sarah Bond led 'this is an Xbox' marketing campaign

Former Xbox president Sarah Bond led the team responsible for the badly-received This is an Xbox marketing campaign, sources close to the matter tell The Verge's Tom Warren.

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Last year, Microsoft did its best to dissuade consumers from buying Xbox consoles. First, Microsoft raised prices, leading to a modern hardware generation with a $800 console. Then the company rolled out the This is an Xbox advertising campaign that reminded everyone that they don't actually need an Xbox console to play Xbox games. Technically, your phone is an Xbox because it can access console/PC games. By this virtue, your cloud-enabled TV is also an Xbox.

The marketing scheme led to a schism internally at the Xbox, new reports say, bristling employees that had been with the brand for years. The ads technically worked: Xbox hardware revenue indeed declined quarter after quarter, leading to Holiday 2025 having the lowest Christmas-time console sales revenues in the last 12 years.

New reports from The Verge give a better idea of what happened. Back in 2024, Xbox's chief marketing officer Jerret West left the company. After West's departure, the marketing teams directly reported to Sarah Bond. It's also said that Phil Spencer directed the efforts to de-couple Microsoft's dependency on Xbox consoles.

Since joining Xbox in 2017, Bond has been instrumental in taking software off-platform with Xbox Game Pass in the attempt at creating a more unified Xbox-PC ecosystem of software. Game Pass expanded and became the primary way to access games on Xbox consoles, and the business model is one that's heavily based on conversion; Microsoft's ultimate goal is to convert buyers into subscribers, to turn software that you buy once and own into services that you pay for multiple times over the year.

Microsoft has repeatedly said that it does not expect to grow its console presence, especially during the FTC v Microsoft trial, where the company said that it did not expect console to grow as a result of the Activision-Blizzard buyout. The expansion to services, and other platforms where consumers already are, was the main goal of the This is an Xbox marketing campaign...but it caused immediate brand damage to Xbox's place in the current status quo.