Jingle Games!
- Brand
- Hermès
- Year
- 2018
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Fashion & Beauty
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Bascule Inc.
Objective
Hermès Japon used its annual Christmas greeting project to carry the brand's 2018 theme, "LET'S PLAY!," into the holiday season, giving people a reason to pass the campaign along themselves: a digital card sent from one person to the next, and on to that person's friends. A parallel goal was to claim the busiest stretch of holiday Ginza, turning the glass facade of Maison Hermès into a public spectacle at Ginza Sony Park. Collecting followers for Hermès' LINE account through free animated character GIFs was a secondary aim.
Solution
On the mobile microsite, the sender types a holiday message in blocky pixel type and decorates it with Christmas-themed emoji of Hermès objects. Hitting send seals the message into an orange box, with every letter morphing into a tiny Kelly bag icon, then ships it off by social media or email. To actually read the message, the recipient has to play: orange snowballs in hand, they catch the Kelly bags as they pop out of the box one by one. At Ginza Sony Park, the same catching game played out live and in pairs, with two people lobbing snowballs at targets projected across the street onto the glass panels of the Maison Hermès facade, each pane lighting up as one pixel of an 8-bit scene; short films ran on the same facade between rounds.
- 1
The player opens the Hermès Japon holiday microsite on a smartphone, a pixel-art, 8-bit-styled greeting service that invites them to build a festive postcard for someone else.
- 2
The player types a personal message in pixel lettering and decorates it with Christmas-themed emoji drawn as Hermès objects.
- 3
The finished message visibly encrypts before the sender's eyes, with every letter turning into a Kelly-bag emoji until the text is unreadable, and the scrambled row of bags is then wrapped into an orange Hermès gift box, which is the postcard itself.
- 4
The sender forwards the box to a recipient through social media or email.
- 5
The recipient opens the link to find not text but an orange box releasing Kelly bags one by one, then plays a catch minigame, throwing orange snowballs at the bags as they pop out; each hit decodes part of the hidden message until it becomes readable.
- 6
Once the message is revealed, the recipient can build and send their own postcard in turn, extending the chain to new players.
- 7
Alongside the game, players are invited to add the official Hermès account on LINE and download the campaign's animated GIF characters for their own messaging.
- 8
Offline, visitors to the ground floor of Ginza Sony Park find life-size Kelly-bag props in various sizes and a horse-drawn sleigh for photos, plus a two-player control stage built for pairs to play together.
- 9
At the console, the glass-block facade of the neighboring Ginza Maison Hermès lights up as a giant 8-bit screen, with each glass block acting as one pixel; the two players see their names on the facade and each steers a named character (players described a red and a blue reindeer) through the same task as the online game, catching boxes and objects with orange snowballs as they appear on the glass.
- 10
Between rounds the facade plays the campaign's short films for onlookers on the street; the projection runs only in the evening (18:00-22:00, until 21:00 on Sundays and holidays) and can be cancelled for weather, so visitors who miss it can scan a QR code on-site to play JINGLE GAMES from their own phone instead.
