December 05, 2005 | Sony PSP Graffiti Rewritten

While a huge number of folks (via Digg) found my original blog post about Sony's guerrilla graffiti ad campaign for the PlayStation Portable, many wondered if Sony was actually behind the campaign or whether the company paid for the wallspace.

Here's my story for Wired News with some details on the campaign and some thoughts from marketers about the graffiti.

Seeking to market its handheld game device to hip city dwellers, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the gadget. But the guerrilla marketing gambit appears to be drawing scorn from some of the street-savvy hipsters it's striving to win over.

Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers' computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, the campaign for the PlayStation Portable is being derided on the internet as an attempt to buy the credibility of street art. [...]

Other cities targeted in the campaign include New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Miami, according to Sony spokeswoman Molly Smith.

The advertising, based on original artwork commissioned by Sony's ad agency, features a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle or a rocking horse, but doesn't include the word Sony or PSP anywhere.

When asked about the criticism, Smith countered that art is subjective and that both the content and the medium dovetailed with Sony's belief that the PSP is a "disrupter product" that lets people play games, surf the internet and watch movies wherever they want.

"With PSP being a portable product, our target is what we consider to be urban nomads, people who are on the go constantly," Smith said.

Floyd Hayes, the head creative director at Cunning Work, which specializes in nontraditional marketing campaigns such as promoting a Sci-Fi Channel TV show about the Bermuda triangle through reward signs (.jpg) for a missing sock, doesn't disapprove of the campaign, though he thinks the seemingly hypnotized kids in the artwork might send the wrong message about the PSP's thrill factor.

But Hayes doesn't think Sony has crossed any lines with the faux street art. "Sony and PSP have every right to use this type of media," Hayes said. "They have done it for (a) very long time very successfully and spoke the language of the streets without being patronizing."

Full story.

I wondered how widespread this backlash was, but given its the highest ranking story on Digg this month (as of today), I'd guess it's fair to say the campaign is controversial.

Posted by Ryan Singel at December 5, 2005 08:50 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/253