according to something i read (i forget where) sony has (or used to) a complete idiot in charge of their advertising. i just found out about this whether old or not, but sony put out a commercial for the ps2 with the symbols of a playstation controller in the shape of a crucifix with the words “10 years of passion.” according to the article i found this in, it was aired for less than a week because they were getting hundreds of letters of complaints every day. they “needlessly offended about one out of every three people on the planet.”
like i said, it wasn’t aired long, but it wasn’t a good idea either.
Two squirrels playing with nuts. They got portable nuts now! PSP - Its like nuts you can play with outside. Another one was dust bunnies with mexican accents…
Or the one with all the people tossing their PSPs like footballs. I dare you to throw a $250 piece of gaming equipment.
What are they thinking? Do they think that kind of stuff sells PSPs? Thats bullplop. Now, if you’ll excuse me… Goes to play PSP.
Care to link to the article? But in the case it was actually real:
One of every three people in the planet is oversensitive. I’m not religious, at least not anymore, but most of my family is made of dedicated Christians and none of them are so goddamn uppity as to get angry about things like these. The man I consider to be my country’s greatest comedian once said:
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING is sacred. You have the right to show respect for the things you consider untouchable and the right to joke about the things you don’t, and so does everyone else. If someone feels strongly about something you just talked about, before he calls you offensive, he should think of all the things he doesn’t care about and other people do. There’s too many people with too many differences to create a rule of acceptable comedy, it’s best to simply laugh and not take things too seriously.
On the other hand, while I still consider the response ridiculous, it was predictable. This was obviously going to cause trouble and I’m surprised they let this air.
I thought the dust bunny commercial was funny. Then again anything with the words “big gun” and “pretty lady” seems funny to me. I can’t believe I laughed so hard when the dust bunny said “I had to fight off all the pretty ladies with my big sword”.
Sony makes great electronic stuffs, but man their PSP ads suck.
I dunno if they’re trying to be avant-garde or what, but they’re neither entertaining, nor informative. My only guess is that they’re using the old ‘WTF was that?’ ploy.
As for the PS2 ad…big whoop. It’s their own stupid fault for not realizing people easily get offended by religious parody.
Um, I believe that commercial was done in Italy…FUCKING ITALY, OK? WHERE THE VATICAN IS? This would be SCEEurope, not Sony as a whole who totally fucked that up.
SE: i read it in a magazine, but i’ll see if i can find it online and will provide a link if i can. if not i’ll flip through all the various magazines laying around my house and post it word for word. also, i’m not saying I was freaking out about it, as you seem to imply. i do think they should have known it would be offensive to some people though. people tend to defend their religions almost if not more than some people defend their atheism, and they should have realized this.
Trillian: yes, the new ads do suck.
deadtear: i stand corrected. because:
This would be SCEEurope, not Sony as a whole who totally fucked that up.
depending on when the cd scandal was, this may have come first. it happened a month or two ago i believe. but i hadn’t heard anything about a cd scandal. what’s that all about?
He’s probably the same moron who runs about every ad-department in the world: an incompetent and provocative and disillusioned little twit who thinks that the only way to persuade people to buy the products he’s pushing is to insult and provoke them with distaseful allusions to religion or sex or by appealing to dimwitted children and ignorant and illiterate adults.
They should employ you. Really, they should. You’ve understood that advertisements are supposed to be cheesy.
I believe their advertising to be good, it somewhat has an Adult Swim approach to things. Just so retardedly ridiculous you can’t help but find it entertaining.
Its funny to see them pouring so much money into an atrocious ad campaign when the company as a whole is doing so poorly. They’ve stopped almost all of their high end products (aibo, qrio, walkman mp3, the top line vaios, bravia) and haven’t moved enough PSPs in America (or Japan). The PS3 needs to kick some serious ass to bring the investors back…assuming they come back for the launch of a new system, a time when most companies take a big hit to ensure the success of the new line.
There’s something dumbly awesome about Sony Ads. Like the soundtracks to the Blade movies. You know they’re stupid, but you can’t help but listening to ‘the Fatal’ for 10 hours straight anyway. At least I couldn’t.
Ugh. Yeah, I don’t really like the PSP commercials at all. They reminds me of the Quiznos commercials from a while ago? Remember those? “WE LOVE THE SUBS…”
