The Challenge
For this campaign, we were looking for a uniquely PlayStation way to reach a broader audience who don’t typically interact with our brand. Our hero film shows an ordinary city transforming into play. From dustbins turning into basketball hoops and staircases converting into slides, PlayStation shows you that play is everywhere and in everything. To compliment this and speak directly to a broader audience group, we set out to find unexpected OOH media to genuinely bring play to the everyday. We identified the London Tube as a place packed with the broadest possible audience, who have very little to do and high dwell time, on their otherwise uneventful journeys. The perfect opportunity to inject play. Each tube line in London features its own recognisable moquette pattern on their seats. This iconic pattern felt like a brilliant way to disrupt and add a playful twist in a way no brand had done before, highlighting our view that play can be found in everyday life and further reaffirming our endline ‘play has no limits’
The Solution
The idea at the heart of our campaign was ‘Play Is Everything’, meaning PlayStation sees the opportunities for play everywhere. To evoke this, we gamified people’s daily commute by redesigning the iconic Victoria line seat moquette into a playable maze, for 6 weeks. The colours and pattern used intentionally mirrored those of the typical Victoria Line moquette to increase the feeling of reward felt by commuters when the maze was spotted. This was the first time in 25 years TFL partnered with a brand to use tube seats as a media space. Consequently, our design for the seating had to be completely bespoke, with no specific templates to follow and a limited array of colour swatches to work with. Time was also not on our side with the entire project designed, manufactured, and implemented from scratch in just five weeks. The end result was fantastic and we were able to reach and entertain hundreds of thousands of non-gaming audiences in a place where they wouldn’t expect a gaming brand to show up, interrupting the monotony of their commute with an opportunity for play.