PlayStation | Play Face | 2009
The obvious truth that emotion shows on your face / PlayStation 3 "Play Face"
Emotion shows on your face. That's basically what the word "expression" means, so it's obvious - but this campaign captured that obvious truth head-on. The faces of people playing a game. That's it. But that's everything.
The problem
This campaign ran in Japan in 2009 to coincide with the launch of the PlayStation 3 Slim. At the time, most game ads leaned on flashy gameplay footage and CG effects. This campaign took the opposite approach. Instead of showing the game itself, it showed the human beings playing it, trying to capture the richness of emotion that PlayStation creates.
The insight
The face you make while playing a game is one you'd never show in everyday life. Serious, absorbed, desperate, sometimes laughing, sometimes biting your lip. Those "all-out" expressions are proof of just how deeply a game can pull someone in. Inspired by the work of photographer Phillip Toledano, this approach showed that the experience of gaming connects directly to something at the root of being human: emotion itself.
The idea
50 Japanese gamers were brought into a studio to actually play PS3 games, and their faces were filmed relentlessly. In editing, those expressions were arranged like a collage, cutting rapidly between the many different emotions that show up during gameplay. No game footage appears at all. The music stays minimal. Just faces, faces, faces. The piece was made by Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo and directed by Timothy Saccenti, and there's an anecdote that because it featured "people who don't normally appear on TV," it ended up banned from broadcast in Japan. The campaign was also extended with a website, playface.jp, which published "Play Face" footage shot by a mobile caravan touring around Japan.
What happened
The campaign launched in August (month 8) 2009 and became a talking point both inside and outside the advertising industry. The very fact that it was banned from broadcast ended up, paradoxically, proving just how powerful it was. Between the broadcast buzz and the traffic driven to the website, it succeeded in making a strong impression for the PS3 Slim relaunch.
Afterthought
How close can you get to something at the root of what makes us human, something truly universal - that's still what it comes down to. Every product, surely, is planned and made with some kind of feeling behind it. This campaign never said the words "games are fun." It said it purely through faces. And that's incredibly powerful. The heart moves more than we think. That's exactly right.
