The gaming landscape has changed.

For context, in just three years Fortnite has grown to over 350m players, bigger than the US population. In 2020, 100 billion hours of gaming content was watched on YouTube from over 80,000 gaming content creators (each with 100k+ subscribers).

Since 2013, when PlayStation launched the successful PS4, gaming had seen exponential growth, an explosion of new competitors and a fragmentation of audiences.

Although fundamentally the reason why people play remains unchanged – gaming enables amazing experiences, facilitates connections, and drives conversations worldwide. It brings people together and thrills them.

In such a highly competitive gaming and entertainment landscape, success for PlayStation’s PS5 depended on creating a global launch that both celebrated gaming and transcended into popular culture.

Our objective was not only preference against gaming competitors but cultural impact that could stand alongside the biggest global tech and movie launches.

Our strategy was to generate cultural impact in two ways; creating pre-launch momentum among the core gaming audience, then cultural impact to excite the masses.

We knew momentum was imperative. The brand that built the perception of dominance, and was ‘seen’ to be winning, would be the brand casual gamers chose.

The global strategy focussed on two key elements:

First, in premium, contextual activity (named RESONANT) we embedded ourselves within the gamer community, seeding emotive brand assets through activations, tactics, and partners that deeply reflected their behaviours and passions. These activations were supported by a bedrock of traditional media to drive visibility of product-focussed launch assets.

Secondly, for the mass launch (named ICONIC & UNEXPECTED), we created a global programme of creative, high impact, non-traditional activations that elevated the campaign to an unmissable global entertainment event. This strand of activity would build the perception of momentum and dominance over competitors.

We executed our strategy in more than 50 markets.

For RESONANT activity, we created custom content including a PS5 spot from the brilliant cartoon characters and gamer favourites, Rick & Morty in their own irreverent style.

On Twitter, we developed a global media-first partnership allowing fans to vote on the emoji that would be the digital icon for the PS5 launch.

We also embraced imaginative partners that allowed us to connect with gamers. In the UK, working with Greggs we created ‘Launch Box’ exclusively available through Just Eat (another gamer favourite).

For global ICONIC & UNEXPECTED activity we “painted the town blue” with a series of building projections and digital billboard dominations across 25 major global landmarks including Times Square, the Burj Khalifa and more.

We transformed the emblematic signage at Oxford Circus tube to reflect the iconic PlayStation symbols, lighting up social media and traditional news media worldwide.

PS5 was the biggest console launch ever, with spectacular demand at launch and 4.5million unit sales.

PlayStation made the most of this pivotal brand moment to lay the foundation for long-term success, achieving PS5 preference more than double Xbox (increasing by nearly 5%) at launch. We also achieved a dominant 70% share of category search.

Our Rick and Morty spot generated mass social presence with more than 10m engagements. Leading up to Christmas, PS5 even starred in its own Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Jason Bateman & Eminem.

The Twitter emoji was voted for by 1.4m users and was used more than 5m times. We dominated the conversation with a majority share of press coverage with more than twice as much buzz as the nearest competitor.

In Google’s Review of Top 2020 searches, ‘Where to buy PS5’ even beat ‘Where to buy toilet paper’ to the number 1 spot!