the launch campaign for playstation 3 is very of the moment. You can only imagine the buzzwords that have been thrown back and forth between sony and its agencies over the last year: transmedia, engagement marketing, brandertainment, and so on.
the idea seems to be to create a digital world called thisisliving.tv that draws people in and gets them spending time with the brand. Traditional media are used as feeders to the full interactive experience. The tv ads are cryptic affairs that merely direct viewers to thisisliving.tv, which is the heart of the campaign. The press ads just describe each of the 'characters' involved at great and tedious length. You have to look very hard for mention of the product.
the result is a sprawling and mysterious multi-media campaign (should that be 'brand experience'?). Only problem is, it's truly f*****g tedious. Much like the barbican centre in london, it is crippled by its lack of a defining entrance or centre. It just kinds of oozes over various surfaces without grabbing the consumer by the throat and pulling them in. The website itself makes you feel lost as soon as you enter it, and not in a good way. And I can still remember two seconds of a little boy in a hood saying "i've commanded armies" from ten years ago...
which makes me think, now that the thirty-second tv ad is dying a slow death, perhaps we should think about what we want to save from it? For instance, the discipline of compression. When you only have thirty seconds you need to leave people with something simple and clear and powerful very quickly. But when you're all about 'experience and engagement' that discipline no longer applies, or seems not to. So you're free to create complex, multi-layered, expensively-produced worlds that nobody wants to live in...
