Sony shoot selves in foot over dismal Viral Ad.
Sony in a misguided attempt to sell their fledgling PSP handheld, hired consumer cockroaches Zipatoni to create a viral video in time for Xmas, to sell the PSP to the YouTube generation.
The very thinly veiled viral shows a young person poorly rapping about the merits of the PSP, citing benefits that are fictitious and transparent as glass in their effort the sell the handheld. Which currently is barely competing against the Nintendo DS. The whole video screamed "suit", with obvious fake comments like "Total LOL". Ironically for all their marketing prowess they couldn't even make a proper viral.
SomethingAwful.com broke the story by revealing the the marketing firm behind the video. The video linked to a blog on http://www.alliwantforchristmasisapsp.com/, quick detective work revealed Zipatoni as the owner of the domain.
Sony has earned world wide indignation for their actions from the gaming community and general consumer base. It quickly pulled the video, the website and issued a poor apology to the public.
Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.
Sony Computer Entertainment America
Here is a Guardian story on the incident, and you can watched the original viral here.
10 Comments
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
I would say that Sony is going through a "dark patch" lately to say the least.
deputydogInteresting.
Cheers Farhad.
Farhad2000Serendipity?
Another corporate viral landed into the VS queue.
This one is a Kenwood now. I spread word round some other sites so it gets hanged as well.
swampgirlThanks Farhad, glad I bought my kids DS's.... does Nintendo have lame viral ads too?
winkler1Shame and humiliation on a large scale are the only thing that will provide some negative feedback to this damn viral campaigns.
benjeeI'd never buy a Sony product again after their multiple Faux Pas in the past (the Spyware / exploding battery incidents of this year alone!) This is more evidence of their corporate stupidity...
Respect for the Guardian link Farhad - Britain's other great media! (I buy the newspaper every week without fail).
snaremopI like their products, but it seems like the company is run by lunatics...
The root-kit software on Sony BMG CDs, the poor, poor launch of the PlayStation 3, and now this.
thecosmicshame says...I suppose that the annikasfriends account really does show how the sift is growing. I feel glad to have joined up before the huge boom.
KrupoThat's hilariously bad (the viral Ken thing).
Can we, like, edit out/wipe out the embedded video link to so it can be "beaten until dead, then beaten some more" please. Actually, that would be an awesome admin command. *flogdeadhorse Who's with me?
I mean, I know we can ask the moderators to actually go in and amputate the code, but it'd be nice to have the following rule: *flogdeadhorse - once a video is subjec to a star-ban command, its embed code is eligible for complete removal using this invocation.
We probably have a bit of "invocation feature creep" going on already, so I suppose this won't be too seriously considered, but I thought it would be an amusing thought.
choggieDamn, imagine that, people using people, fact of strife-
Is this why no one voted for the girl bathing in Bailey's Irish Cream??
perhaps another go-round....which is exactly the response youd' hear from chogg, following, the question," Another go in the Irish Cream then??"
Discuss...
Enable JavaScript to submit a comment.