Sony Behind Fake YouTube Viral Campaign

Wowzer writes "Sony is up to the same old tricks again. Following in the footsteps of their fake PSP Graffiti campaign, Sony has hired marketing company Zipatoni to set up a YouTube-based viral marketing scheme for the Sony PSP. The company did this by registering the domain alliwantforxmasisapsp. There are no disclaimers to show it isn't 'real', but the website's whois points out it's setup by Zipatoni." From the C&VG article: "The lies don't end there, fake comments have been posted at Kotaku only linking to the Youtube video to increase its pageviews: 'Good call on DJ max. Regarding music: if changes were to be made for westerners, this guy should be considered - LOLZ'" Update: 12/13 02:37 GMT by Z : The Washington Post has an article stating that the FTC will look into situations like this, if they perchance to come up.

What is going on?

[mgblst]

Sorry, I am not quite clear on what Sony has done wrong? They paid someone to help them advertise the PSP. The advertises did this by attempting to create a viral campaign. Ok, so beside the fact that this is clearly not aimed at slashdotters or the other people who seem to be getting upset about it, why is this a problem?

Don't get me wrong, I will never by a PSP or another sony product again (the cameras were ok), for the many attrocties they have done on the buying product (and I don't count the price of the PS3 amoung them), but lets stop knocking them for every little thing they do.

Re:It's called Marketing

[erroneus]

I think every form of advertising needs to express that it is an ad. There has been much discussion about fake or otherwise paid 'news stories' during normal news broadcasts. This falls within that classification in my opinion. If it purports to be genuinely fan-based and is not, it's a lie -- just as when news media purports to be presenting a product endorsement as a genuine "unbiased news item."

When information is presented, it should be cited when there are profit-based slants involved. I don't want to say there should be a law about it, but in some cases, there are already laws about it. But basically, I believe that if companies have a right to sue and use legal intimidation to slap down critics and even genuine fan-based media, then the public should also have a right to be informed when they are being fed a load of crap generated by marketers and advertisers. I would only consider that to be fair and balanced.

Did Sony release the symbols to public domain?

[ReallyEvilCanine]

In the "blog" Sony paid for (and condoned) is the following:

don't just wear it - pwn it!!1!

<pictures snipped>

step 1: download [alliwantfo...isapsp.com] the iron-on patterns sheet
step 2: print
step 3: cut out pieces you want on your t
step 3: iron on
step 4: wear it like u mean it

No terms. No requirements. No restrictions. No demands. No disclaimers. Anyone who understands "pwn it!!1!" can easily claim that Sony paid a company to expressly promote and authorise the free use of any and all trademarked symbols, none of which display a trademark symbol in the PDFs, for their own purposes regardless of what they might be. That is pwnage.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Ryan Amos]

The general rule on the internet these days is to assume that any product promotion is actually created by a marketing company. "Fanboys" and the like are more likely just marketroids paid to post good things about PSPs on internet forums.

Re:The Apple way

[Sosigenes]

Just wanted to pick on a point here which you raised which I'd be interested in learning more about. You comment 'WMP is, of course, a joke.' - "of course", why is that?

I use Windows Media Player 10 and have done for a long time for my music needs. I have Naspter (and subscribe) which integrates perfectly with WMP, I can listen to any music I want to at the click of a button, I can get music inforamtion on music I've both bought from Napster or ripped myself. Windows Media Player has my entire music library stored and handles it well and uses very little CPU or memory usage, I can leave it playing in the background most of the time quite happily. My two problems with it was that it didn't like tracker music files, but thanks to directplay that was easily solved, and that it was big, solved by finding a great skin named Tiny Player which is perfect. I have a pocket PC, a creative zen vision and a GP2X which I use for music/videos, and WMP handles both fine when it comes to automatically or manually handling. Therefore, I would like to challenge your comment that it is a joke - it's easy, it's simple and it works well and even those I know who have relatively little computer knowledge have been able to use it without problem. I find itunes a bit on the bloated side - I much prefer WMP with it's 10mb memory footprint maximised and 4mb footprint minimised - there's not really an excuse for bloaty applications, and this ZDNet article about utorrent in 130kbytes and its superb low memory footprint and resource friendly programming sums up my view quite well - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=153 [zdnet.com]. Just because computers these days doesn't mean there is good justification for lazy programming and resource hogging which simply wasn't possible in the past.

I'd also like to add that my pocket PC, gp2x and creative zen vision all function great, I get great playback, battery life and features from all of them and have never had any problems.