Playstation: Advertising That Gets Me October 10, 2011

Right now the video game media has been drooling all over this new Playstation advertisement, called the “Michael” ad, which they claim is probably the greatest video game advertisement in history.  While I wouldn’t go as far as to say all that, I did like it.

But you have to remember something, that Sony had just gotten back into the groove of continuing with their highly successful advertisements starring Sony VP Kevin Butler, and the launch of the Long Live Play (LLP) campaign, all started with the return of Kevin.  Kevin of course said that LLP was his idea in the first place.

Kevin of course, has understood me in the past quite a bit.  I still remember the Sony E3 2010 press conference.  I don’t know if I was proud or sad that I recognised the face of Jack Tretton in that advertisement, I was laughing too much that Kevin would keep a picture of Jack in his desk at all times.  That was my favorite moment in the ad.

The thing is, people who have been following the gaming industry for the past ten years should be in the know that Sony has been making ground-breaking advertising since the days of the original Playstation.  While no one would argue there were be plenty of ads they’ve done in the past ten years that completely missed the mark (the 1995 commercials looked pretty stupid and anyone remember that PS10 series back when the PS2 launched?) the recent wave of successful ad campaigns Sony has been riding reminded of one of their very early commercials, which hold up even to this day.

Two years ago I attended a gaming discussion hosted by Yale University which was moderated by N’Gai Croal and featured speakers like Kellee Santiago.  Before the discussion began, N’Gai showed us this Playstation ad to get us into the mood.

The ad talked about the double lives we have as gamers, and that’s what facinated N’Gai about it.  That we as gamers do live a double life.  In the one life we have the mundane jobs and scurry about with everything in black and white, and in our gaming lives we have reached for the stars to accomplish the impossible tasks we could never achieve like command armies.  Those words looked at the surface of something much deeper.  Its almost as if these shared experiences almost make gamers everywhere like brothers, and whoever wrote the ad understood that.  This was years before Kevin Butler was “named” Sony VP.

So, bravo Sony Marketing Department, you still get me, you still get us.