Ryan
The Plan: Tap into the online youth market by trying to create a viral, amateur-feel campaign
The Story: Sony, generally considered by many to be pretty reliable and cutting edge when it comes to cool home electronics, decided to put the marketing of their PSP system in the hands of complete and total assholes. Treading into the dangerous waters of viral marketing, the ad agency Zipatoni made a terrible, terrible video of some dude rapping about how he wanted a PSP for Christmas and posted it on Youtube along with links to a website. That alone might not have killed Sony, but they added fake comments on Youtube and other sites, including hip slang filled conversations like this one put them over the edge:
Here’s the deal — I have a psp but my friend jeremy does not. but he wants one this year for xmas. So we started clowning with sum not-so-subtle hints to j’s parents that a psp would be the perfect gift. we created this site to spread the luv to those like j who want a psp!
Wow, look at all that bad grammar, this must be legit and awesome. Let’s all get PSPs. Never once was it mentioned that Sony was behind this at all and everything was presented as being strictly fan made. The campaign was torn apart viciously and exposed over at Somethingawful.com, and managed to create near unheard of hatred amongst Sony’s target audience. Sony responded with what may be an apology but mostly comes off as the sad attempt of a clueless parent to speak the language of the kids with gems like this “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” in it. The videos were taken down and the site now redirects to Haagen-Dazs.com.
