PlayStation: Game For A Change

Prior to the mid 90s no one over the age of 15 would have admitted to owning a video game console. A surprise visit from a friend would have resulted in kicking your Mega Drive under the bed and hoping they didn’t trip over the wired control pad. Consoles were toys. Toys are for kids. Adults who did play with them probably did so in darkened bedrooms on Friday nights, alone, or at a push, with other Metallica T-shirt-wearing outcasts  who couldn’t get girlfriends.

Console yourself with play

The truth is, consoles were nothing to be proud of. They weren’t very good. Sega’s Saturn was a cosmic flop, Atari’s Jaguar was a joke and PC gaming, save for a few classics like Doom, was convoluted, time consuming and plagued by computer crashes (if you could load a game in the first place).

But Christmas 1994 saw the atomic bomb of the video games industry dropped onto the world. The brainchild of Sony’s Ken Kutaragi, the PlayStation launched first in Japan and annihilated the competition with its mind-blowing technology which rendered 3D graphics, and its revolutionary control pad; the most intuitive ever designed. Just like the nuclear arms race, the PlayStation sparked a scramble to lead a new league of gaming technology that took six years for any other manufacturer to seriously challenge. But there’s not much point in building a grown-up games machine if everyone thinks it’s for kids.

“It was an interesting time because [before PlayStation] there were only two gaming brands on the market; Sega and Nintendo. They were really toy brands, probably best depicted by their Mario and Sonic characters. They were really sort of niche brands,” remembers David Patton, who left his post as UK product manager at Nintendo to become vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in 1995, before the console’s European launch that September (he later served as senior vice president from 2004 to 2007). Sony’s mantra was to “legitimise gaming in the eyes of the mass market,” says Patton. “We wanted to take gaming to a broader and an older market. We wanted gaming to grow up.”

“From the very onset of launching, we set out to create a brand that was aspirational, incredible, but always somewhat unconventional. We always wanted advertising that disrupted and challenged people’s perceptions of the brand and we always wanted it to trigger a high level of involvement and engagement.”

Creating engagement with a brand might sound like a cinch today, but at the time, Mark Zuckerberg was probably more concerned with hair growing in strange places than inventing Facebook, and the internet was still, for most people, the stuff of science fiction. It took mould-breaking thinking to create a conversation between brands and consumers back then, but Sony seemed to have the formula for success. “We always targeted the opinion leaders in everything we did and we worked on a very simple philosophy that [if you] get the three per cent [the leaders], the 97 per cent will follow,” says Patton. “We’re talking about, in an interesting way, not gaming opinion leaders but lifestyle opinion leaders. So PlayStation became very much involved in a lot of skate parks, very much involved in music, somewhat involved in film. But really, PlayStation was very much associated with entertainment.”

By the late 90s PlayStation had infiltrated public consciousness like no console ever had. Giant versions of its WipEout game were ridden (and fallen off) by boozy young adults in nightclubs, and pixel pin-up Lara Croft graced the cover of The Face. But the concept of gaming hadn’t earned the ‘cool’ stamp just yet. That came in 1999 with the release of what many falsely remember, due to its monumental significance, as PlayStation’s first advert.

Double Life was nothing short of an instant classic. The 60-second Frank Budgen-directed spot by TBWA GGT Simons Palmer, which showed ordinary people from all walks of life talking about the double life they’ve led (playing PlayStation games), was beamed into homes and projected onto cinema screens across Europe, captivating audiences. The ad did two things: “It was really the start of taking PlayStation truly to what I call the mass, mass market. Existing PlayStation owners loved it because it absolutely got their world, so they immediately identified with it, and the non-gamers were drawn into it because it was something they’d never seen or experienced before,” says Patton. Tony McTear, founding partner and ECD at Peak15, remembers Double Life’s other function. “It made the brand really cool,” he says. “Double Life took away the stigma of sitting in your bedroom and being a loner.”    

Playing the future with the PS2

The PlayStation went on to become the first console to sell more than 100 million units worldwide but despite its success, in 2000 Sony was ready to release an even more revolutionary machine, the PS2.

The brand had previously dabbled with surreal advertising (for example Chris Cunningham’s Mental Wealth, which featured an otherwise normal-looking Scottish girl with alien-like eyes talking to the camera in a mock interview style) but when it wanted to get really weird, there was an obvious man to turn to. The Welcome To The Third Place spot that launched the PS2 was the first helmed for the brand by David Lynch and was, frankly, baffling. But that’s not a bad thing, insists Patton. “In many or most cases, the audience at large never really understood our advertising. But in failing to understand it they were drawn in even deeper as they sought to try to understand it, or at least find out ways of understanding it.” More and more surreal campaigns would come in the future, but while McTear agrees that some of the brand’s advertising hasn’t made much sense over the years, he explains single ads should not be taken out of context: “What you can’t do is look at any of the ads as a one-off. You can’t take a snapshot of the brand and say, ‘that was really surreal, what the fuck was that all about?’ because there was a careful build-up for a number of years.”

Let the games begin

If the PlayStation was an atom bomb, the PS2 was the Death Star. Within six months of the PS2’s arrival in 2000, Sega had not only discontinued its Dreamcast (the first sixth generation console) which had already had a year’s head start on the Sony machine, but the fellow Japanese manufacturer had pulled out of the hardware market altogether. The PS2 was run by an advanced CPU dubbed the Emotion Engine, which Kutaragi named after his belief that its unprecedented mathematical capability would eventually be able to simulate emotion. The PS2 also featured DVD playback and was cheaper, at £299 in the UK, than a decent standalone DVD player. This led to the PS2 moving from the bedroom into the living room. It was now on show. It was now a respectable, functional entertainment appliance and a lifestyle furnishing. It is the best-selling console of all time, having shifted more than 150 million units to date.

Just a year later, the first real challengers to Sony’s gaming throne emerged; the eventually less significant Nintendo GameCube and the deeply worrying Microsoft Xbox. The first American console to launch since the Atari Jaguar, there was no way Bill Gates would become a laughing stock and Sony knew that they would be outgunned in terms of marketing dollars. Did that make it more difficult to keep the crown of top creative dog? “No, but it made it more necessary,” asserts Patton. “Xbox was lucky in some ways, because they just tried to imitate PlayStation’s strategy. Fortunately, for PlayStation, it didn’t do it as well and offered, from a marketing perspective, nothing new.”

In November 2003 Sony again used advertising and brand identity to stay ahead of its rivals. Deservedly or not (some would argue that Xbox Live was a superior platform) the brand established itself as the frontrunner in online gaming thanks to its Fun, Anyone? campaign, most noted for the Mountain TV and cinema commercial. McTear, then deputy ECD at TBWALondon, was responsible for the spot. Again employing Frank Budgen behind the camera, the ad was set in Brazil and saw thousands of people (thanks to crowd-generation software MASSIVE and hundreds of extras) forming a human mountain and taking turns to enjoy a brief spell at the top, to the soundtrack of Shirley Temple’s De Gospel Train. The ad premiered in 30 countries, was nominated for scores of industry awards and scooped the following year’s Film Grand Prix at Cannes. The campaign’s effectiveness was evident in sales too, with Sony’s market share increasing by three per cent during its run. “Mountain put PlayStation at the forefront of online gaming before everyone else was really fully up and running. They were very good at that right the way through – they led the pack by a country mile,” recalls McTear.

And then there was PS3

McTear went on to mastermind the 2006 European launch of the PS3 with the This Is Living campaign.“The brief from PlayStation was, ‘get us banned’,” chuckles McTear. “They were Chris Deering’s (former president of Sony Europe, chairman/CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment and legendary character within the company) words to us. ‘Do the most challenging work you can. Get us noticed, get us banned, get us talked about,’ he said.”

Having released a series of straightforward lectures online a few weeks prior to the launch with PlayStation developers explaining the new technology, the boring part was out of the way. McTear and TBWA were then left with the task of capturing the market’s imagination and cooked up an elaborate campaign that centred on a fictional hotel. Within that hotel lived numerous bizarre characters, each representing a different PlayStation 3 game. A six-minute film was released as well as dozens of shorter pieces featuring the characters talking about what ‘this is living’ meant to them. There was also an interactive angle, with the audience having the option of visiting the hotel online and exploring its rooms, rifling through the possessions of the characters, and even buying some of them – like war veteran Kovak’s medals – on eBay. Again it was surreal, and some people questioned its relevance to gaming.

Product philosophy

“You weren’t meant to understand it. The whole community around PlayStation knew the console was coming; this was just about creating intrigue around the brand. The whole thing was about driving you to this experience. It was a very brave thing for the client to buy and we pushed it as far as we could push it,” says McTear. “The brand at the time demonstrated such confidence in its approach. Almost bordering on – and I mean it in a good way – arrogance. You can get away with that. As long as your product delivers, everyone will put up with it and enjoy it.” He does lament, however, that the campaign wasn’t employed wholescale by all of the markets and, as a result, may have lost some of its impact. “It went right around Europe but it got forced into more and more conventional outlets. There were 14 different markets who all wanted a certain cut-down version for their market. We were forced into changing the model into something it wasn’t meant to be.”

In recent years, surrealism has made way for more understandable PlayStation work. Until three years ago, the brand did not exist in Latin America, and so Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi ECDs Maxi Itzkoff and Mariano Serkin were handed an unusual brief. “Due to the fact that Wii –which had been targeted toward the whole family – had become significantly popular in the region, our campaign was to be directed to a much broader target,” they say. “So our challenge was somewhat complex. On one hand we had to communicate to a broader audience and, on the other, we needed to preserve the brand’s edginess.”

In 2010 Del Campo released Victor, an enchanting TVC that showed a businessman with a baby’s head who is constantly entertained by his mundane daily routine. It was the perfect spot to appeal to the mass market the agency was targeting and it perfectly encapsulated the campaign’s tag line, Live In a State of Play.

That spot and Del Campo’s Neanderthal from late 2011 – which showed a caveman coming out of hibernation and waxing lyrical about competitiveness being part of the human race’s DNA – were both directed by Garlic’s Marcelo Burgos. “Both of the stories are not about the product. They’re all about philosophy. It would have been disappointing if they went down to the specific virtues of the product,” says the director, who felt the brand’s extensive history in the rest of the world made it tricky to create a fresh angle. “It was difficult to say something new with PlayStation. The baby approach I thought was brilliant, I loved it. When there’s nothing left to say and you still have to make it relevant, make people like it and engage with it, it’s quite difficult.”

Surrealism gives way to function

While Latin America required a launch from scratch, PlayStation North America has only needed a little redirection in recent years. In 2007 the brand ended its 13-year relationship with TBWAChiatDay, who launched the PS3 with the Baby and Rubik’s Cube spots that asked serious questions about how far the brand’s surreal image could be pushed. Deutsch LA was appointed as the brand’s new agency for North America and parts of Canada.

Deutsch ditched the aloof approach in favour of something more functional, says executive vice president and group creative director Jason Elm. “The PlayStation brand as a whole had made a big shift from PS2 to PS3, because the PS2 is like R2D2. Everybody had one in their house. It was a trusted brand; it was a source of fun and camaraderie. Because of the [launch] campaign and issues with the device itself, PS3 was like Darth Vader,” he says, in reference to the high-tech device that was expensive to buy and fronted by confusing work. “I’m guessing that gamers saw this as being a little arrogant, a little misunderstood, a little vacant. And so we learned that we had positioning problems in terms of people didn’t know what the PS3 could do and they didn’t know what the price was. So we really needed to put a face on the PS3, give it a bit of personality, try and get back to that PS2 personality of irreverence and fun.”

This face came in the form of a hugely successful campaign starring a fictional PlayStation executive, Kevin Butler. A comedy character who lampooned gaming execs, Butler could tweet, he could present TVCs and he could even ‘come back from the future’ to reveal new tech in online videos. The tagline for the campaign was ‘it only does everything’, which Elm describes as “probably the first PlayStation tagline ever that was more functional rather than emotional”. After two years of using Butler, Deutsch’s research, which showed that the public now understood what the PS3 did and had re-connected with the brand. It was time to tap back into their emotions. So, at the end of 2011, the Long Live Play campaign was born, kicking off with To Michael, a daring and dazzling film starring 25 of the most recognisable, most loved characters from PlayStation’s history all recreated in live action, all in the same room.

In it we hear the likes of Solid Snake and Nathan Drake telling stories about a man named Michael who has assisted them in their various quests over time, to eventually find out that the man they worship is a gamer, just like any other PlayStation owner.

“We wanted to do an anthem to gamers that reminded them why PlayStation is such an important part of their life,” says Elm. “The feedback we got from that spot was overwhelming. People who don’t even own a PlayStation were like, ‘that’s how I feel, thank you, I’m proud to be a gamer’.” The spot, which required approval from each game’s developer and unprecedented attention to detail, notched up three million YouTube views in 24 hours and has over 11 million to date.

All the world’s a PlayStation

Deutsch has also completed some compelling interactive work for PlayStation, such as Hall Of Play presented by Kevin Butler, where fans can connect via Facebook and see their own pictures appear in PlayStation’s history books, as well as becoming the hero in To Michael (the characters even say your name). The agency’s Shoot My Truck campaign for the game Twisted Metal though, has caused the biggest buzz recently. In February this year, fans were invited to use their computer keyboards to operate a real machine gun that was positioned in the Nevada desert to destroy the ice cream truck driven by the central character in the game. “Whether you agree or disagree that hooking a gun up to the internet is a good idea, you can’t argue that it wasn’t awesome,” enthuses Elm.

PlayStation also recently switched agencies in Europe. After its long-lasting relationship with TBWALondon came to an end, the brand employed 180 Amsterdam in late 2011 to handle the European, Indian, Australian and New Zealand markets. “Our region is the largest, with the most diversity of markets both in terms of geography and language. So we need to develop campaigns that can adapt easily and without confusion across borders,” says creative director Galen Graham.

Play up, play up and play the game

In February the agency released The World Is In Play, a spot promoting the handheld PlayStation Vita that was reminiscent of Double Life. “The World Is In Play shares an executional technique with Double Life but it was created with other intentions in mind,” says Graham. “Much has happened with the PlayStation brand since Double Life. Gaming has gotten popular. It has mass appeal. And it’s no longer a method of escape. Gaming has moved from the bedroom to the living room to — with the launch of Vita — the entire world.” He goes on to say that: “This new brand spot is less a comment about who plays and more a commentary about how and where they play,” adding: “The message is no longer about escape. It is about discovery.”

Moving forward, 180 is keen to get stuck into digital work and plug into the “emotional experiences” that PlayStation offers, says Graham. “We want to elevate PlayStation’s role as a creator of culture. We want to look beyond the role of the player in the game and celebrate the role of the game in life.”

It’s an exciting time for PlayStation, says Peak15’s McTear: “I would kill to work on Sony right now. There’s never been a better time to work on that brand,” he says, citing modern media platforms as an ideal way to get its message across. “Gone are the limitations of media channels where you went through all the painful ones of TV, print, radio, poster, blah blah blah. Now it can come from absolutely everywhere and what better brand to be in that arena than PlayStation, where you expect it to come from everywhere? That’s a fantastic opportunity for 180 and the relationship should be a fruitful one.”

Del Campo’s Itzkoff and Serkin agree. “The future of advertising in general is not very encouraging. There are very few businesses that are willing to make bold choices, seek innovative messages, and not allow perverse testing systems to impede the creation of an exciting campaign. PlayStation, in contrast, is one of the few companies that employs truly forward-thinking individuals. Due to the nature of the brand, they’re willing to take risks that other brands aren’t willing to take.”

Sony changed the games industry forever in terms of technology, but what is more important to its customers, and even those of its competitors, is how it changed what it means to be a gamer. Thanks to PlayStation and the people who have built its brand identity, there’s no need to kick your console under the bed when a friend comes round to visit anymore.