Brand: Sony Bravia LCD TV
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Beauty-Seeking Television Watchers
Reviewer: David
Rating: **

Description:
We see aerial shots of San Francisco and then balls rolling down a steep hill, down a street. There are more and more balls of different colors until it is a flood of balls and a riot of colors. Eventually, the work ‘Colour’ appears, followed by ‘Like No Other,’ then a shot of the LCD television with ‘Bravia LCD Television’ inside it and finally ‘like.no.other’ and ‘SONY’. The spot is set to the song ‘Heartbeats’ by Jose Gonzales. This is a U.K. spot which debuted in cinema in November 2005 (in a 2:30 version) and moved to television.

What Works:
This is a very beautiful spot. In fact, this is probably one of the most beautiful and memorable commercials you will ever watch. The cinematography, music and slow-motion effects are all top-notch and the spot is visually entrancing. Time seems to slow down as you watch those balls tumbling down the hilly streets of San Francisco.

What Doesn’t:
Our ad coverage is generally US-centric but we chose this spot to make a point. While this spot is undeniably beautiful and incredibly memorable, what is not memorable is the brand it connects to. Yes, there is a connection between colored balls, color and color televisions, but it is pretty abstract. Seeing those balls roll down a hill for two minutes and twenty seconds before seeing the Bravia and then the Sony name in the last ten seconds doesn’t do much to make Sony or the Bravia memorable. This is the type of spot that people talk about all day but then when you ask them ‘what was the brand’ they have no idea.

Here is the problem where art and advertising meet. Great art can be bad advertising. Fallon has made great art for Sony but bad advertising. It is good for the agency and bad for the brand.

Branding Bottom Line:
We want to hire the director to remake a Fellini film. What was that brand, again?

Brand: Playstation Portable - PSP (Sony)
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here (link is to Adland Ad-Rag, which charges a small fee for viewing)
Target: Game nuts
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David

Description
This spot is limited-motion animation in black and white. A squirrel whistles and throws a nut at a tree. He yells, “Come out and play!” A second squirrel pops his head out. “Ah can’t! I’m playin’ NUT!” the second squirrel replies. “But there’s portable nut!” says the first squirrel, raising an acorn above his head. “WHAAATTT?” the squirrel in the tree yells. “Yeah, it’s a nut you can play with outside,” the first squirrel exclaims. The spot shifts to a line-drawn image of the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) and a voiceover says “PSP. It’s like a nut you can play with outside.”

What Works
This advertising blog reviewed the launch campaign for the Playstation Portable in May, 2005 (click here to read the review.) While the campaign was creative and well-executed (called ‘Point of view’ it showed the reactions of players to PSP from the point of view of the PSP), we felt it failed for one simple reason. The Point of View campaign showed games being pulled away from their loved ones by the game. Gaming in this campaign was an isolating experience.

Along the way to promoting the same product benefit (portability), TWBA/Chiat/Day has come up with a completely unique campaign that doesn’t make the same mistake - and this one is a winner. “Nut” is a hyperactive, visually exhilarating execution in the style of anime that has been drained of all color. The effect is startling and even with the sound off or in TiVo fast-forward mode this spot is hard to miss.

Sony and Chiat use this focused attention to deliver a simple and compelling message - PSP is playstation but portable. The visual effects and the unique voices in the spot help make the message memorable.

This is all obvious from watching the execution. What you may not have noticed is how Sony and TWBA/Chiat/Day have transformed the solitary game experience in the first PSP campaign into a group activity. It is no accident that the ‘portable nut’ squirrel is outside and is trying to get his friend outside. The outdoors here connotes both freedom (portability) and sociability. The call to action (literally a call in this case) is for joining - come play a game with me. This again reinforces the social aspect of the device.

This underlines one of the key insights into gaming for those of us who may not be console gamers - it is not a solitary activity. Most gamers spend long stretches playing games but they do it with friends. It is social activity. The PSP has excellent wireless connectivity which was ignored in the launch campaign. This time Sony has gotten it right by remembering that its core gaming audience are joiners, not loners.

What Doesn’t Work
Dramatically and artistically it makes sense that the connection between “NUT” and PSP be drawn only in the last five seconds of the spot. Sony can get away with this because it is the only relevant portable gaming console at the moment. However the lack of branding for most of the spot is a controlled risk.

This spot may become iconic, but expect to see copycats. If b&w, limited animation spots start to proliferate, Sony will need to move in a new direction.

Branding Bottom Line
Sony shows us the NUT and we want it.

Brand: Sony Playstation Portable
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Gamers and everyone else
Reviewer: David
Rating: ***

Description:
Instead of seeing the Playstation Portable through most of the spot, we instead see the gamers playing it.

What Works:
Showing the gamers instead of the game itself is novel and it gives a strong emotional link to the total absorption that the PSP gamers feel when they are playing. Fortunately, the spot starts with the Playstation brand (just a flash), so we are less likely to wonder what we are looking at for the first ten seconds. All the visuals are top-notch and the spot makes the unit look appealing. The soundtrack also lends urgency to the visuals, and keeps us moving throught the spot.

What Doesn’t:
From a brand strategy perspective, Sony makes two questionable choices in this spot.

The first is the choice of user. The spot has a hip, young, urban-culture feel to it. It is anti-establishment. Now in classic branding, you want to show the ‘brand lover’ - the core of all of the users of your brand. The folks portrayed in this spot are certainly brand lovers. But you also want the users to be aspirational for the rest of your target audience. And here’s where I’m not sure that the choice of users in the spot is a good one. The gaming audience is a lot older than people think (I believe the average age is pushing 30). And it is not particularly anti-establishment.

I suspect that Sony was looking at the demographics of portable gamers when targeting the spot. Right now, portable gamers are younger - the skateboarder crowd. But this is mostly due to the platform that dominates at the moment (Gameboy Advance) which reflects Nintendo’s demographics which are a lot younger than the industry as a whole. Look at the cost of the PSP, however and some of the earliest games (sports games feature prominently) and you’ll realize that a lot of the folks who will be carrying a PSP around by next year will be wearing ties and hiding it in their briefcases. There is ONE young guy in a suit playing the game on an elevator, but the overwhelming user imagery is of young and edgy people. This imagery may not help SONY if one of the important early target groups looks at the commercial and can’t identify - even aspirationally - with the kids on the spot. Perhaps this might have been a chance for SONY to micromarket and produce different spots with different user imagery for different demographics and ad mediums.

There is a second problem with the way Sony portrays the user. As marketers we are much less likely than the general population to play video games. So we need to work doubly hard to understand the mind of the gamer. Unlike the image we may have of the gamer as a social outcast, the opposite is true. Most gamers play with others and gaming is a social activity for the majority of gamers. The real genius of the Playstation Portable is the wireless networking ability (similar to N-Gage, but likely to be on a much wider scale), allowing PSP gamers to connect with both friends and strangers, which may make the PSP the first truly new singles accessory of the 21st century.

As brilliant as the execution of this TV spot is, looking from the perspective of the video game out to the user tends to isolate the gamer. In fact, one of the brief shots is of a girl trying to get her guy’s attention while he is riveted to the game. The spot completely misses the connecting power of the PSP and that is a mistake.

Lastly, I’m not sure about the few brief glimpses of other functionality for the PSP. It’s true that you can play movies (in Sony’s proprietary format) and audio, but those should be follow-on pitches to make to those who’ve already bought the system. Given the cost of the movies (and the fact that there’s no way to watch DVDs you already own on it) and the trickiness of the MP3 player, this is not going to be a big draw for those who don’t already own the system.

Branding Bottom Line -
A brilliantly executed spot, but perhaps executed against the wrong strategy.