‘HYPELOOPS’ is a strategic engagement campaign that helped re-inject the Playstation brand into the everyday lives of young gamers who were drifitng towards X-Box.

Working with Playstation's roster of developers we got gaming's most popular characters doing super random stuff, and then augmented it with branding, supers, and integrated animation flourishes. A few of them also featured gaming's biggest YouTube stars.

The central Giphy hub housed a huge library of these gaming gifs for fans to use as they pleased...

To maximise potential uptake, the library could also be accessed from within messaging apps...

Ten of gaming's biggest YouTubers, including the Sidemen, were then brought onboard helping to launch the content to millions...

BACKGROUND:
Playstation wanted to re-connect with a youth audience that was increasingly favouring X-Box.

To improve brand preference it was important Playstation showed an understanding of the world young people inhabit. With this in mind, the campaign focused on giving PlayStation a credible, earned presence in the digital banter of young gamers by speaking a language they know and love…

I created a project team, and working with the audience we created the first ever gaming gif set - we called them 'Hypeloops'. Dozens of Playstation branded gifs were designed to fit perfectly into spiky teen banter, with the UK’s biggest gaming vloggers then flooding the internet with them. The library was available directly through WhatsApp, iMessage and GBoard, as well as on a branded Giphy page. 

The idea was simple but super effective. At present Giphy reports over a billion uses of the content and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down…