Emo Tear.
Seriously – it’s kinda sad when it becomes apparent that a corporation is surviving off of the fact that it was already massive and not off of any new business plans or great advancements. But only sad in a “gee, that’s kinda lousy” and not sad in a “here, have $600 of my money, you obviously need it” way. Such, apparently is the story of Sony. In case you missed it, here’s a quick rundown courtesy of monkeydew.
There were the ill-conceived ‘fake’ PSP graffiti ads, the ‘White is Coming’ European PSP ads which featured a white woman grasping the face of a black man that were accused of having racist undertones. Then last year’s awful ‘Portable Nuts’campaign failed to ignite public interest in the machine in the territory where the PSP had performed the strongest, North America. The spots featured animated squirrels talking like gangsters and trying to sell consumers the idea of the PSP as being a portable equivalents of what gamers have in their home since the PSP is supposedly very close to the PS2 architecturally.
Like to eat nuts at home? Well with a PSP, you can take your nuts on the road, ‘portable nuts’ get it?
And, as the same entry reports, Sony’s latest marketing scheme has blown up in its face. Apparently, Sony has been posting fake virals from PSP “fans” on services like YouTube. The lousy production quality and “let’s-make-fools-of-ourselves” attitudes of the people in the videos match nicely with the typical virals that populate those sites, but beyond that they are almost painfully obvious shills.
So, let’s see. The UMD movies failed to get off the ground. Blu-Ray appears more and more to be a failure (don’t cry, Sony – HDDVD doesn’t seem to be doing that well, either) – and while the system is going for massive prices on eBay, it really appears that Nintendo is poised to win the next-gen console wars by reasonable pricing and doing better at meeting demand. Meanwhile, their marketing department has gone completely insane.
How is Sony making money these days?