With no additional budget allocated, the goal was to use modest resources for maximum impact on Russian social media scene in terms of brand awareness and social good.

Creative idea was to translate the quirky Russian tradition of leaving celebratory 'graffitis' for women who have just given birth into digital GIFs that will allow Russian men aged 25-36 (core audience for Sony PlayStation) to celebrate women in their lives and acknowledge their contributions in a safe and legal manner — and yet do so on every surface in the country.

Additionally, Sony as a brand would become a proud part of the national phenomenon and help make the namesake Sonya Graffiti Instragrammable.

‘Sonya Graffiti’ is a national phenomenon in Russia characterised by ‘thank you’ messages that men leave on the walls in cities to celebrate women for giving birth to their sons and daughters. These graffitis have become so widespread that authorities have nearly given up trying to fight the trend. Most of them bear the name ‘Sonya’, short for Sofia, which is one of the most popular baby names in Russia. Incidentally, Sonya is also a popular slang term for the Sony PlayStation in the Russian language.

Seeing a connection between the Baby Name, Graffiti, and the Brand, Sony decided to launch digital version of the graffitis as GIPHY Stickers in Instagram Stories so that anyone could find them in their Instagram app cameras, take pictures or videos and apply the stickers to any wall in Russia.

Most of the stickers were designed to mimic the style of the actual graffiti

On International Women's Day, March 8, 2019, a series of 27 multilingual stickers became available in Instagram Stories, searchable under 'thanks' and 'spasibo', the latter meaning 'thank-you' in Russian.

The stickers are hosted on GIPHY at http://giphy.com/playstationru

Over 100 publications in mass media.

Massive buzz on social networks.

Total reach: 32 million people.

Since the day of the launch, the virtual graffiti have been used over 15,000,000 times, and we estimate that we've saved about 15,000,000 million walls in the process.