Sony Behind Fake YouTube Viral Campaign

Wowzer writes "Sony is up to the same old tricks again. Following in the footsteps of their fake PSP Graffiti campaign, Sony has hired marketing company Zipatoni to set up a YouTube-based viral marketing scheme for the Sony PSP. The company did this by registering the domain alliwantforxmasisapsp. There are no disclaimers to show it isn't 'real', but the website's whois points out it's setup by Zipatoni." From the C&VG article: "The lies don't end there, fake comments have been posted at Kotaku only linking to the Youtube video to increase its pageviews: 'Good call on DJ max. Regarding music: if changes were to be made for westerners, this guy should be considered - LOLZ'" Update: 12/13 02:37 GMT by Z : The Washington Post has an article stating that the FTC will look into situations like this, if they perchance to come up.

Comments

It's called Marketing

[nephillim]

... it is not lying... it is, and has been for many years called marketing.
the beer commercial shows you that when you open up one of their beers you get 20 naked women to show up at your party, but the "other" beer brings balding middle aged men.
This is no different from any other commercial on any other form of media.
Hell, Some drug ads never say what they do (so they don't have to give side effects) similar to Sony not saying this is an ad.

Re:It's called Marketing

[fistfullast33l]

If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius. Instead, it's a total marketing scam because it was done by Sony, who most likely just paid the company to market it and said you guys are the smart ones, you figure out the campaign. This article smacks of teenage journalism, completely down to the Liar, Liar DVD cover. Are these guys just realizing now that marketing companies play dirty to get you to buy their product? Welcome to reality, children.

I'm also a little confused as to how the comment on Kokatu was linked directly to this marketing company. The commenter is mrjohnstamos who has no linking information whatsoever and only one comment. Suspicious, but nowhere near the proof that the evil hand of Sony is behind this.

Can we get some real news now?

Re:It's called Marketing

[Aladrin]

In the same vein, this does appear to be a blog by someone whose friend wants a PSP. But reading just a little into the site shows how lame this site is. It says the same thing constantly: Here's how to bug the people in your family that have money until they buy you a PSP. Nowhere at all does it show the fanboyism that would be necessary to create a site like this.

Add to that the fact that the site is VERY well designed, the graphics are all professional, and there's a really cute chick. Any 1 of those 3 could be chance, but the change that a 13-yo professional-level web and graphic designer ALSO has a cute chick for a friend is absolutely absurd.

The only people going to fall for this are the same 13 year olds that ALREADY want a PSP for xmas. Nobody else will care.

Re:It's called Marketing

[mike260]

Beer ads are clearly understood to be ads by everyone but small children. The website in question pretends to be something it's not (albeit very ineptly) - you have to look at whois to find out it's an ad. But I agree, it is a form of marketing (better known as astroturfing).

Re:It's called Marketing

[voice_of_all_reason]

the beer commercial shows you that when you open up one of their beers you get 20 naked women to show up at your party, but the "other" beer brings balding middle aged men.

Honestly, which party would be better for you, the host? Buying a few 24 packs of coors light for you and your sports friends or stocking up on 4/$9 wine coolers for the ladies? Think about it

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

"the beer commercial shows you that when you open up one of their beers you get 20 naked women to show up at your party, but the "other" beer brings balding middle aged men."

The beer commercial doesn't hide the fact that it is a beer commercial. If I sat down in bar, got chatting with someone random, and had them recommend a type of beer to me, then found out later that they were working for that beer company, I'd be as pissed (as in off) as I am at these bullshit under-the-radar marketing campaigns of Sony's.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Opportunist]

What beer is that? All I get to my party are balding, aging men who... went to school with me.

Thanks for making me feel old.

Re:It's called Marketing

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

The problem isn't that Sony paid for cheap-tactics marketing, it's that the attempt is so thinly veiled. Have you even looked at the site yet? It is so obviously created by a marketing firm that is pretending to be an authentic teenager. I don't know about anyone else but if I'm going to have someone lying to my face I'd rather they actually make it believable.

Re:It's called Marketing

[erroneus]

I think every form of advertising needs to express that it is an ad. There has been much discussion about fake or otherwise paid 'news stories' during normal news broadcasts. This falls within that classification in my opinion. If it purports to be genuinely fan-based and is not, it's a lie -- just as when news media purports to be presenting a product endorsement as a genuine "unbiased news item."

When information is presented, it should be cited when there are profit-based slants involved. I don't want to say there should be a law about it, but in some cases, there are already laws about it. But basically, I believe that if companies have a right to sue and use legal intimidation to slap down critics and even genuine fan-based media, then the public should also have a right to be informed when they are being fed a load of crap generated by marketers and advertisers. I would only consider that to be fair and balanced.

Re:It's called Marketing

[jandrese]

The biggest giveaway is right on the header. Nobody in real life tries to work in the X, O, Square, and Triangle into their website, only Sony Marketing would do that. I mean the writeup complained that it was not obviously labeled as an ad, but honestly, how many people are going to think otherwise?

Re:It's called Marketing

[hexix]

This story on Slashdot has that strange "lying" spin on it. Everywhere else I read this story, everyone just seems to be laughing hysterically at how pathetic Sony is. Watch the video and you'll understand.

If the point of this campaign was to make it look like the PSP had a big underground following for being cool, it has totally backfired. Who wants to own a PSP now if it means being associated with the character in this video?

Re:It's called Marketing

[fistfullast33l]

I don't know about anyone else but if I'm going to have someone lying to my face I'd rather they actually make it believable.

So alliwantforxmasisapsp.com isn't obvious enough for you? How about the following quote from said website:

consider us your own personal psp hype machine, here to help you wage a holiday assault on ur parents, girl, granny, boss - whoever - so they know what you really want.

Nope, I guess that's definitely a hormone raging teenager who really really wants a PSP. The scary thing is that statement resembles many fanboy comments on slashdot, but that's all I'm going to say about that.

Re:It's called Marketing

[hal2814]

What are you 13? You can keep the ladies who drink wine coolers. I'll take the ones who drink real drinks like tequila and vodka. But to answer your question, I'll take the beer. Being married with children, I rarely have time to unwind, drink beer, and watch sports with my buddies anymore.

Re:It's called Marketing

[chrismcdirty]

I hope you don't smoke at the bar, or sit around people who do smoke. Have you seen what a smoker's lungs look like? I suggest you stop hanging out at bars, stop smoking, and have some Chewlie's gum.

Re:It's called Marketing

[voice_of_all_reason]

Such a thin line separates a brilliant marketing strategy from a shitty one

If I was in a bar and some guy walked in, announced he was from Beer Company X, then handed over a case for the bartender to distribute for free with his blessing, I'd thank him kindly and certainly try his product. I might even become a customer.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Doomstalk]

The problem is that it's awful. Just one viewing evokes a strong desire to do physical harm to yourself. If Apple or Nintendo made this, they would be mocked.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Tim C]

He was moaning that it was *too* obvious, not that it wasn't obvious enough. Perversely, he seems to want to be taken in when people lie to him...

Re:It's called Marketing

[Lisandro]

No, bullshit. Sorry. This is NOT marketing, and in fact it's borderline deceiveing. I don't give two shits if they call it viral marketing, or astroturfing, or whatever. It is a scam simply because it intends to mislead the consumer by making him beleive that what he's seeing was created by someone who really would like a PSP for Christmas. The fact that this one is so poorly made that it begs to be laughed at is irrelevant. I don't know what saddens me most, the fact that a lot of people just can't grasp the difference or (even worse) that they're so used to this kind of promotion that think it's normal.

By the way, this was created by a PR agency - just click here.

But then again, it's Sony we're talking about. It's not like they have a track record in this sort of matters...

Re:It's called Marketing

[soft_guy]

Apple doesn't have to fake grass roots support - they have an actual real cult following. (Even if some people think we Mac Fanboys are a bit looney sometimes.)

No, fake grass roots campaigns are deceptive and in every case I'm aware of are done by companies that are so uncool that it makes my face hurt. And it isn't that I'm particularly outraged by this campaign, but it does make the PSP seem kind of lame.

Re:It's called Marketing

[soft_guy]

Such a thin line separates a brilliant marketing strategy from a shitty one
 
If I was in a bar and some guy walked in, announced he was from Beer Company X, then handed over a case for the bartender to distribute for free with his blessing, I'd thank him kindly and certainly try his product. I might even become a customer. I believe that thin line is called "honesty". In the first guy's example, he would feel like he had been deceived. In your example, you wouldn't feel deceived and also you'd be glad to have a free beer. Now, the bar owner might not be so happy that people are handing out free beer in his bar (i.e. no one is buying beer and he isn't making money).

Re:It's called Marketing

[drinkypoo]

Apple doesn't have to fake grass roots support - they have an actual real cult following. (Even if some people think we Mac Fanboys are a bit looney sometimes.)

Cult following... how appropriate. The rest of us are waiting for you all to drink the kool-aid or eat the pudding or whatever.

Re:It's called Marketing

[PingSpike]

I pretty much agree. Both ATI and Nvidia have recieved a lot of flack lately for their viral marketing campaigns...but when you look at its base its the same old story: paying people to pretend to like your products. Ultimately the buyer has to beware and trust their own judgement. You're always getting lied too, so this isn't really anything new. Do what you always did, assume you were being lied to until its revealed otherwise.

However, this doesn't stop me from seeing how utterly pathetic it is to pay a marketing firm to pertend to be a teenager. I can just imagine a group of middle aged marketing execs sitting around a table discussing "whats cool with teenagers these days" and trying to graft those aspects onto a fake individual that everyone is going to want to emulate. It makes me laugh...but honestly, large groups of stupid people working together to come up with stupid ideas is hardly a new theme. Seems like it would be cheaper and get better results to just pay a bunch of teenagers to brag about your product on forums instead.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Ryan Amos]

I've always wondered how many of those "fanboys" are 22 year old peons at a marketing firm designed to start "internet hype."

Seriously, for about $50,000 you could pay a small army of net nerds to hype your product for a few weeks and get more exposure to clients than spending that money on a national TV spot. You think marketing companies don't know this? They've been astroturfing internet forums for years, and they've gotten really good at not looking like astroturfing.

Re:It's called Marketing

[soft_guy]

Apple doesn't have to fake grass roots support - they have an actual real cult following. (Even if some people think we Mac Fanboys are a bit looney sometimes.)

Cult following... how appropriate. The rest of us are waiting for you all to drink the kool-aid or eat the pudding or whatever.

You missed it - we all bought copies of MacOS 9.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Ryan Amos]

The general rule on the internet these days is to assume that any product promotion is actually created by a marketing company. "Fanboys" and the like are more likely just marketroids paid to post good things about PSPs on internet forums.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Chris Burke]

If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius.

Oh hell no. If Nintendo or Apple did this, I would say "Fuck you, Nintendo" or "Fuck you, Apple".

Show me the Nintendo or Apple advertisement that pretends not to be an advertisement, and you have a point. No, "The Wizard" doesn't count. Until then, this is simple: Sony hired someone to astroturf for them, and thus I say "Fuck you, Sony".

Astroturfing is not new, but it's always despicable. Like the phone makers that paid models to hang out in bars flaunting their technology. If Apple paid people to hang out in bars showing off iPods, then they'd be just as bad. So far as I know they don't. Sony is engaging in the same practice, which is to make it appear as though someone likes their product because they truly like it, when in reality they are paid boku bucks to pretend they like it. That's simply rotten.

Re:It's called Marketing

[drinkypoo]

If 9 is the kool-aid, then 7 is a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun in your mouth spraying your brains across the ceiling.

Re:It's called Marketing

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

I dunno, I just want them to be good at what they do. . . I mean, if you're getting paid to lie shouldn't you be good at lying?

Re:It's called Marketing

[HappySqurriel]

If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius. Instead, it's a total marketing scam because it was done by Sony, who most likely just paid the company to market it and said you guys are the smart ones, you figure out the campaign. This article smacks of teenage journalism, completely down to the Liar, Liar DVD cover. Are these guys just realizing now that marketing companies play dirty to get you to buy their product? Welcome to reality, children.

I would have to disagree with you on this because, as far as I can tell, Nintendo is loved (in part) because of how classy of a company they are; in other words, people like them because they don't do stuff like this and had Nintendo produced this marketing campaign it would have hurt them far more than Sony. Basically, Nintendo doesn't pay artists to grafitti on walls, they don't produce ads in European countries focusing on "race" to promote the new color of thier system, and they don't make fake blogs to talk about how great their system is and this is why some people like them.

Look at the Wii comercials, no matter how crappy you think they are the main message is "look, the Wii is fun to play" ... How original, showing people playing games in your comercials rather than creepy babies or ravens or self solving rubics-cubes.

Re:It's called Marketing

[mOdQuArK!]

Good point - it might have been more win-win for everyone if the salesperson bought a round for everyone of his own company's product from the bartender.

Re:It's called Marketing

[j00r0m4nc3r]

You are right. Those other people are wrong. What if Sony just made up fake movie reviews, or music reviews. They have actually done this and gotten in big trouble for it. They invented a fictional movie reviewer and plastered fake quotations (ie "The best film I've seen all year!!!") on their movie posters. TOTALLY 100% WRONG. This is no different. The consumer has a right to know what is an ad and what is not.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Pojut]

You are somewhat wrong. Most of the time you see a drug commercial not say what it does, that is because it has not yet been approved or has it's approval pending by the FDA. They are not legally allowed to tell you what it does in a commercial unless it has been fully tested and approved by the FDA.

Now, a pharmaceutical company can choose to not tell you what it does, although that is rare (there are some out there that do it on a regular basis though...never quite understood that)

Re:It's called Marketing

[brkello]

How is it any different than if they show an ad of someone on TV that really wants a PSP? It is pretty obvious when they do this stuff because the pages are too well setup for a normal person. It is deception, but it isn't a scam. A scam would be if you send them money for a PSP and they just took your money. This is just...well, marketing. It really doesn't make a difference. Maybe someone somewhere buys products based off this sort of thing. I don't buy things based on some random person's (fake or real) website. I just don't see how this is a big deal.

Re:It's called Marketing

[brkello]

When information is presented, it should be cited when there are profit-based slants involved. I don't want to say there should be a law about it, but in some cases, there are already laws about it. But basically, I believe that if companies have a right to sue and use legal intimidation to slap down critics and even genuine fan-based media, then the public should also have a right to be informed when they are being fed a load of crap generated by marketers and advertisers. I would only consider that to be fair and balanced.

But that would mean the end of Fox News.

Re:It's called Marketing

[__aaclcg7560]

Mac OS X "Leopard" supposed to be LSD? Sweet!

Re:It's called Marketing

[crabpeople]

"It is a scam simply because it intends to mislead the consumer by making him beleive that what he's seeing was created by someone who really would like a PSP for Christmas."

So this is unlike all advertising, how exactly?

Do supermodels really eat at mcdonalds? Does the hot 19 year old who gets picked up by the 55 year old in his bimmer really want to sleep with him when shes not getting paid? This guy was paid to say he likes the psp. If it helps your mind any, for the right amount of money lies can become truth. Especially when the lie is "liking" or "wanting" something which is entirely subjective and personal.

All advertising is a evil manipulative trash for the mind. This is just advertising (shudder) 2.0.

Re:It's called Marketing

[fistfullast33l]

Okay stop drinking the kool-aid. Here's a nice article from IGN on a viral-marketing campaign by Sony in 2000. Promoting what game? Perfect Dark. Where does the site DataDyne.com point to now? Rare, developer of Perfect Dark. Everyone's reaction? Smartest thing ever!!!!!! So, when one company uses a little bit of hidden marketing it's perfectly fine, but when another more evil company does it, it's the end of the world and we need to protect the children.

Re:It's called Marketing

[soft_guy]

If 9 is the kool-aid, then 7 is a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun in your mouth spraying your brains across the ceiling. System 7 was very good for the time when it was released.

Re:It's called Marketing

[fistfullast33l]

By the way, this was created by a PR agency - just click here.

I never disputed it was made by a PR agency - I was disputing absolute proof that the Kokatu comment was. How do we know that wasn't made by the author of this article and then used by him as absolute proof of a conspiracy? It might have been a 10 year old who actually liked the movie and decided to share it. You don't know, and only Kokatu can prove different, which they haven't so far.

Re:It's called Marketing

[drinkypoo]

System 7 was a huge step backwards in reliability from system 6. It added improved multitasking abilities but frankly the difference to the user was not huge as compared to the multifinder in 6. It added truetype fonts but everyone who actually needed scalable fonts was using postscript with ATM already. System 7 was a huge boondoggle and probably did more to send people away from the mac than anything else anyone has ever done.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me at "really cute chick"

It took some digging, but here's the direct link so others won't waste 4 min of their life, like me.

http://www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/blog/default. aspx?id=3&t=dont-just-wear-it-pwn-it1#posttop

Re:It's called Marketing

[MojoBox]

That's "beaucoup", by the way. Beaucoup bucks.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Lisandro]

It's different the second it has a Sony logo plastered over it.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Chris Burke]

Merci.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Benanov]

Okay stop drinking the kool-aid. Here's a nice article from IGN on a viral-marketing campaign by Sony in 2000

You mispelled Rare.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Lisandro]

All advertising is a evil manipulative trash for the mind. This is just advertising (shudder) 2.0.

Much agreed. It's just it can't be called advertising once the little detail of who's advertising is left off. Or better said, disguised as something completely different.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

That website fitted into the game, and they didn't have shills astroturfing. If you can't see the differences in the two campaigns, then there's not much hope for you.

Re:It's called Marketing

[scot4875]

Why is this so hard to understand?

When you see the hot model on TV eating McDonalds (lately it's just been a group of racially diverse trendy-looking idiots smiling while they eat the garbage) you KNOW that it's an ad.

With an astroturfing campaign like this, you don't know whether or not it's a genuine fan site or if it's Sony-sponsored. This site even goes so far as to display an image that says "this is not an ad."

Can you seriously not see the difference? The first ad is clearly a McDonalds ad -- they just try to give you a favorable impression of their product by showing pretty people eating it. The 2nd is masquerading as a fan site, trying to make you think that there's someone out there that really does believe all of the things they're saying without being paid to believe it.

--Jeremy

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd agree with you, but the big difference here is that there is no news site involved.

News sites should be trying to maintain a certain level of journalistic integrity. This is an ad campaign floating around on the internet that you would have to go find and watch.

Re:It's called Marketing

[soft_guy]

System 7 was a huge step backwards in reliability from system 6. It added improved multitasking abilities but frankly the difference to the user was not huge as compared to the multifinder in 6. It added truetype fonts but everyone who actually needed scalable fonts was using postscript with ATM already. System 7 was a huge boondoggle and probably did more to send people away from the mac than anything else anyone has ever done. You make a good argument. When I bought my first Mac it came with System 7.0.1, so I really can't argue system 6 vs. system 7.

Re:It's called Marketing

[drinkypoo]

My mom bought a IIci right before the demise of System 6 so I got to spend some quality time with it before 7 came out and I did the upgrade on her system. She still used that machine to do actual work including illustrator and photoshop until just a few years ago, upgraded all the way to 40/500 :D Trust me, the whole thing blew up a HELL of a lot less under System 6. Did it have all the nifty features? Assuredly not. But frankly, they weren't really needed, either. Stability was much more important and Apple utterly failed to provide it. System 8 was much better, and 9 better still...

Re:It's called Marketing

[L7_]

There are no such things as astroturfers. Hell, *you* are probably paid by anti-marketing firms to spew nonsense about marketing firms! [Made tounge in cheek!]

I think that when people distrust everyone on the internet as much as they do "people from London on Craigslist" or "Russian girls on Myspace" or "GNAA on Slashdot" or "Brazilians on Orkut", and realize that you can't really trust who edited that Wikipedia article on self STD diagnosis or posted that blog about using 'sudo \rm -Rf /' to fix your Nvidia drivers, then the internet will become a better place. There are going to be people eeking out an existence by modifying the information and posting on message boards to market consumer products and post Amazon referral links. Its a shady business and some people just don't get why.

As soon as we show as much trust to random people on the internet (even our friends on the internet aren't to be trusted!) as we do to people walking down the street in a major metropolitan area, is when we trust them enough.

Re:It's called Marketing

[fistfullast33l]

With an astroturfing campaign like this, you don't know whether or not it's a genuine fan site or if it's Sony-sponsored. This site even goes so far as to display an image that says "this is not an ad."

Yup, these guys were so good that no one realized that their fake weblog was a paid advertisement.

Re:It's called Marketing

[dknj]

i seem to remember a movie that was a box office smash complete with a false documentary on the sci-fi channel. WAS THAT 100% WRONG?

lets go back further.. was the original War of the Worlds wrong? if you could go back in time would you ban these works of art because they are wrong/immoral? if so, how do you propose we avoid ever letting things like this happen in the future?

Re:It's called Marketing

[HyperHyper]

you just proved that this type of marketing works - here you are talking about their product and speaking on their behalf whether you like it or not. Some people think that there is no such thing as bad marketing and I'm still not sure if I believe it or not. Regardless, you are spending your time focusing on them when your mind could be focused on another product - Good or bad.

Why is everyone so offended by false advertising anyways? It's been around for years and people aren't serious about getting rid of it. If they were, they would push to have a law passed where the penalties are so severe that it would deter the offenders. You can ignore it and enjoy life or focus your "anger" and spout obscenities. Your choice... /HH

Re:It's called Marketing

[szembek]

It's not a scam. It's just marketing. The same marketing they've been doing for ages. Just a different medium.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Chris Burke]

you just proved that this type of marketing works - here you are talking about their product and speaking on their behalf whether you like it or not. Some people think that there is no such thing as bad marketing and I'm still not sure if I believe it or not.

Yeah, all the coverage on the Sony exploding batteries was a marketing coup for them. And why are convicted sex offenders so upset at having to go door to door to announce their presence -- there's no such thing as bad pr!

I'm sure my "Fuck Sony!" comments are really the response they wanted.

Anyway, I didn't say it didn't work. I said it was fucking despicable.

Why is everyone so offended by false advertising anyways?

Yeah, why would anyone be offended by lies? Why would I be upset that someone portraying themselves as an average joe is really a corporate shill?

It's been around for years and people aren't serious about getting rid of it. If they were, they would push to have a law passed where the penalties are so severe that it would deter the offenders. You can ignore it and enjoy life or focus your "anger" and spout obscenities.

We do have laws about it, but the problem is that since an unfortunate court decision on the 14th Ammendment, corporations are granted all the rights of human beings and thus any effective truth-in-advertising laws would run afowl of the 1st ammendment. Thus it joins a thousand other issues that you might want to just hand-wave away with "people aren't serious" that are actually more difficult to solve than it would seem at first glance, and which no, it doesn't make sense to devote all our resources to.

I'm not sure what that last sentence means... as if because I author a post on /. containing the word "fuck" I'm not enjoying life? Fuck, venting about evil marketroids' works is a great way to increase my enjoyment of life. Fuck Sony in their lying ass! See? I feel better already!

Re:It's called Marketing

[HCase]

As for War of the Worlds. It was a book before being broadcast on the radia, and when adapted and broadcast it was announced, multiple times, that it was fictional. When it was realized that some people were taking it as actually happening announcements were made in the middle of the broadcast to assure them that it was not real. Welles also said afterwards that he didn't think they would do something like that again because it hadn't been their intention to scare people.

Re:It's called Marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

... it is not lying... it is, and has been for many years called marketing.

That is because marketing, for many years, has been institutionalized deception when it isn't outright lying.

the beer commercial shows you that when you open up one of their beers you get 20 naked women to show up at your party, but the "other" beer brings balding middle aged men.

And you know it's a beer commercial, and it's also ludicrous enough that you know it's a joke. How is this related to something plausible that deliberately tries to hide the fact that it's an advertisement?

Hell, Some drug ads never say what they do (so they don't have to give side effects) similar to Sony not saying this is an ad.

How is that similar? Some drug ads never say what they do. It's at least obvious that they're drug ads -- or at least, that they're ads for something!

You'd have a point if the drug ads pretended to be documentaries, but they don't. Thank you for reminding us that even drug companies are more ethical than Sony.

And based on your ethics, I strongly suspect that you work for Sony. If you do, go listen to the Bill Hicks rant, and kill yourself.

Re:It's called Marketing

[2nd Post!]

What it means is that these marketing companies are trying to emulate real customer enthusiasm... to generate "word of mouth" interest.

Unfortunately it won't work if the device in question isn't sturdy enough to carry that burden.

Re:It's called Marketing

[feepness]

The problem isn't that Sony paid for cheap-tactics marketing, it's that the attempt is so thinly veiled. Have you even looked at the site yet? It is so obviously created by a marketing firm that is pretending to be an authentic teenager.

So half the people are complaining it's too obvious and the other half are complaining there isn't a disclaimer somewhere on the site. Amazing.

I also heard that Sony employees breathe regularly. You may want to check that out.

Re:It's called Marketing

[jgc7]

If you think a fake blog or website is bad, check out this article about Sony paying people to ask other people to take their picture with Sony's hot new phone. It is pretty much proof that Sony is run by assholes, who don't mind taking advantage of other people's kindness.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/HolidayTheme/story? id=2690905&page=1
I agree, FUCK YOU SONY

Re:It's called Marketing

[esocid]

The difference between the two is that your 13 year old cousin can't broadcast a video of her dancing to the black eyed peas on national television. The purpose of youtube isn't just another marketing niche, it's a place where members can post anything they want (to an extent) and not have to worry about harassing commercials, or even subtle ones, or the regulation that comes with tv. Sony on the other hand just sees dollar signs and could care less about harming what youtube initially intended for its purpose. If some sort of ethics laws aren't adapted to viral marketing, it may just destroy what youtube and google video established.

Re:It's called Marketing

[soft_guy]

My mom bought a IIci right before the demise of System 6 so I got to spend some quality time with it before 7 came out and I did the upgrade on her system. She still used that machine to do actual work including illustrator and photoshop until just a few years ago, upgraded all the way to 40/500 :D Trust me, the whole thing blew up a HELL of a lot less under System 6. Did it have all the nifty features? Assuredly not. But frankly, they weren't really needed, either. Stability was much more important and Apple utterly failed to provide it. System 8 was much better, and 9 better still... OK, but if you compare Apple's offerings of the period vs. the competition of the period, MacOS 9 is not as good as Win2K whereas System 7 beats the hell out of DOS 6.0 which it was competing against.

However, you aren't the first person I've heard say they preferred System 6 over System 7.

Re:It's called Marketing

[TheGrinningFool]

Not only is it marketing, it's damned effective marketing. Do you folks really think that they were trying to hide it, when all anyone had to do is a whois lookup? You believe that they were so short-sighted as to not realize that? "Private" registrations are $3.00 extra these days. Don't you think that they knew this? Almost all registrants offer it to you when you register a domain nowadays - it would be hard not to know about it.

So you all go ahead and laugh at them for their "inept" viral marketing. Judging by the rapidly rising number of comments on the web site, it's worked perfectly. They may have pissed off some customers with this; but the word of mouth and name recognition they'll get from this will pay off a hundred times over.

Well done, Sony.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off the games forum, you wankers

Re:It's called Marketing

[TrilateralRegression]

The problem isn't that it's an experiment in creating an artificial carrier for a viral ad, it that it's suckitude... is reaching... Shatnerian proportions! TFA may smack of teenage journalism (which I don't think is a bad thing [that is, teenagers writing]), but the ads, just... I don't have the words.

Re:It's called Marketing

[CodeArtisan]

No, bullshit. Sorry. This is NOT marketing, and in fact it's borderline deceiveing. I don't give two shits if they call it viral marketing, or astroturfing, or whatever. This is hardly a new concept, even on the interweb. The Blair Witch Project is the obvious example that springs to mind, but there are countless others. It's not any worse, or any more convincing, than the Post-It notes that appear in some of the magazines on ad pages ("Thought you should read this - Bob").

Re:It's called Marketing

[fistfullast33l]

From that article:

"I feel violated," he says. "I mean I had a connection between the two people and then to find out that they're salesmen."

Give me a break. You didn't feel some deep down emotional connection. You had a conversation, took a picture, and walked away. Taking advantage of people's kindess? You must be the same guy who felt violated. Oh no, actors out in public in Times Square, the most commercial block in the entire world, selling products. Let's get a grip, shall we?

Re:It's called Marketing

[drinkypoo]

It's true that System 7 beats DOS 6 in every way but reliability :) It beats Windows 3.1 as well - which was released a year later, and it beats Windows 3.1 in the reliability department, too. Windows NT 3.1 didn't come along until 1993, a whole two years later. But really, the only home desktop GUI competition was Apple! And they took a gigantic step backwards.

Re:It's called Marketing

[maglor_83]

VB commercials show overweight, middle aged men enjoying a beer after a day's hard work. And they're quite good ads, too. They then spawned some spin-off radio ads, which can be viewed here

Re:It's called Marketing

[Elouise]

Why would you want net nerds to do anything? Look at the snakes on a plane hype that took over the Internet, but never turned into box office numbers. Snakes on a Plane: Opened in 3,555 theaters 1st Weekend Box-Office: $15.3 million Borat: Opens in 837 theaters 1st Weekend Box-Office: $26 million

Re:It's called Marketing

[RalphSleigh]

Cool, a message for all those clever clogs who found out the scam lookie here

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a bit too late for damage control, don't you?

Re:It's called Marketing

[fithmo]

If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius.

Well, Microsoft did the same thing, how do we feel about them?

Re:It's called Marketing

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

It is a scam simply because it intends to mislead the consumer by making him beleive that what he's seeing was created by someone who really would like a PSP for Christmas

Oh, you mean like the ads I'm seeing on TV saying "Panadol, It's my choice"? Or like so called infomercials out there, which is half an hour of someone raving about how good a certain brand of blender is?

It's an old tactic. Deal with it.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Lisandro]

Oh, you mean like the ads I'm seeing on TV saying "Panadol, It's my choice"? Or like so called infomercials out there, which is half an hour of someone raving about how good a certain brand of blender is?

The same Panadol ad with the Panadol logo at the end? Or the shopping channel infomercials that reminds you every 20 minutes that the "show" you're watching is a paid advertisement? Come on, the line might be thin, but it's still there. The fact that advertising nowadays is pretty fucked up doesn't excuse it.

Re:It's called Marketing

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

What if Sony just made up fake movie reviews, or music reviews.

What if they financed some piece of media that makes such reviews? Isn't that practically the same? If they did, they wouldn't be the first company to do so. Hell, there are plenty of free local papers out there that rely on the "contributions" of other businesses that it favourably reviews. People pick up on the lack of negative reviews, or the poor taste of the reviewer, and the reviewer never becomes reputable.

They invented a fictional movie reviewer and plastered fake quotations (ie "The best film I've seen all year!!!") on their movie posters

Well, this is why I always check that the source of the quotation is respectable. Besides, the quotation system is broken. There's always some unknown reviewer looking to get his name on a poster willing to be gushing about some stinkbomb. Not to mention problems with taking quotes waaaaaay out of context.

Re:It's called Marketing

[fade-in]

I think this is poetic justice. It is very satisfying to see Sony paying way too much for an underperforming product.

Re:It's called Marketing

[theLOUDroom]

So which marketing firm are you astroturfing for?
You forgot to plug them :)

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

in reality they are paid boku bucks to pretend they like it.

Don't actors get paid to pretend they like stuff?

Re:It's called Marketing

[KillerCow]

I think every form of advertising needs to express that it is an ad.

Read this: The Submarine, and try to keep your head from exploding.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

If its so good, why isn't the PSP doing better? Since, you know, these campaigns are SO effective...

God, the name of the site isn't even catchy enough for people to remember this was a PSP campaign. At this point, the best thing Sony could do is start a rumor that this was really done by Nintendo to promote the DS, and hope that dampens their sales a little.

As someone who works on campaigns that use similar approaches (fictional blogs and real life events) that Sony is making infamous with their little stunts, I think this is worth being angry about. There are plenty of campaigns out there use blogs and email for fictional people, that are fun to interact with, and actually give the audience a reason to listen. Sony is giving these campaigns a bad name.

Re:It's called Marketing

[biovoid]

Show me the Nintendo or Apple advertisement that pretends not to be an advertisement, and you have a point.

What about all the Apple laptops you see in movies and TV shows? It's a fine line between paid (or "donated") product placement and pretending not to be an advertisement in my opinion.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Disseminated]

SoaP is a bad example of how viral marketing may or may not help a product, because SoaP's internet hype was a SEPARATE product. Most folks (well this folk, at least) enjoyed the tribute to camp but knew damn well they wouldn't enjoy the movie!

Marketing an actual product like a PSP virally is completely different because the hype hasn't become self-aware and its own living breathing thing.

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! You have to use your critical faculties to determine if the information you are consuming is an ad or not, instead of having that detail being handed to you on a silver platter. What ever shall you do?

(I am advertising for common sense here.)

Re:It's called Marketing

[trentblase]

It is a scam simply because it intends to mislead the consumer by making him beleive that what he's seeing was created by someone who really would like a PSP for Christmas.

I have no doubt that the guy would like a PSP for christmas. Who wouldn't? At worst, you could hawk it on ebay.

Re:It's called Marketing

[hkmwbz]

If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius.

Says who? The paid Sony shill on Slashdot?

Don't try to fucking justify Sony's bullshit by talking about irrelevant crap like "the other guys would get away with it, boo hoo". The other guys didn't do this. Sony did. Whether anyone else would get away with this or not is just speculation, but coming from you I bet it's a Sony employee's desperate attempt at fending off well deserved criticism of his employer.

Re:It's called Marketing

[glesga_kiss]

Drug commercials scare the hell out of me. Who are they aiming for? Ill people? Hypochondriacs? Doctors? Because of the NHS, this is something that I've never seen in the UK, with the possible exception of those little blue pills that are synonymous with email spam.

Re:It's called Marketing

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

The same Panadol ad with the Panadol logo at the end?

Like the reviews with pictures of the thing it's reviewing?

Or the shopping channel infomercials that reminds you every 20 minutes that the "show" you're watching is a paid advertisement?

Not the infomercials I've seen. I probably don't look at the same ones you do.

Come on, the line might be thin, but it's still there. The fact that advertising nowadays is pretty fucked up doesn't excuse it.

Actually, it does excuse it. The line is in fact gone. The state of advertising nowadays has now trampled the line. It was easy because the line was an ethical one, not a legal one.

It was pretty fuzzy to begin with anyway. Look at local free newspapers. They always have relied on the contributions of business that they review or highlight. Consequently, the reviews are always glowing and the news is always good news. There's no written warning saying "This newspaper is 100% marketing pap".

Re:It's called Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. All they had to do was to go to Myspace.com and click "Save as..."

Re:It's called Marketing

[gr8tango]

so I think I'd like a scion, but from what it sounds like, the customizer commercials may be marketing in the same what that sony does it. I see tricked out scions parked at movie theaters and clubs, but there's nothing that says "this is an ad". When I watch TV and see tuners showing their scions and talking about customizing, I never see them talking about getting paid to trick it out or how much free stuff toyota gave them to do it. Is that marketing dishonesty, too? Why don't we all assume it's marketing so we don't waste energy on trying to figure out if it is. Better yet, maybe we can debate if Apple's ads are lies, too. You see a hip, trim, and athletic cut-out dancing with an iPod, are we being misled into thinking that anyone who get's an ipod is cool, hip, trim, or athletic? Should apple and all consumer goods companies provide "truth in advertising" and say "your actual coolness may vary" or "apple: we're selling cool AND the ipod" you only get the ipod"?

Re:It's called Marketing

[rjung2k]

"What about all the Apple laptops you see in movies and TV shows? It's a fine line between paid (or "donated") product placement and pretending not to be an advertisement in my opinion."

It's not Apple's fault if other computer makers have PCs and laptops that look ass-tastic and make set designers retch at the thought of sticking them in their movies and TV shows.

Re:It's called Marketing

[biovoid]

It's not Apple's fault if other computer makers have PCs and laptops that look ass-tastic and make set designers retch at the thought of sticking them in their movies and TV shows.

The set designers don't decide.

It's called product placement. Apple pays the production company to have their laptops displayed in the movie. Why do you think there's that glowing Apple logo on the lid? Because it looks good?

Re:It's called Marketing

[ogewo]

Neither the consumer, nor anyone anyone else, have a right to know anything. It's up to the individual to decide who and what to trust, that being no one until you have reason to do so(see "skepticism"). I applaud Sony's unsuccessful attempt at deceit for making the process that much easier.

Trying to make it 'cool'

[HappySqurriel]

Is it my imagination or is Sony's strategy for their playstation line to attempt to make their product 'cool' rather than to make it a good product for gamers. Over the life of the PSP it has been outsold by both the GBA and Nintendo DS and has failed to make a larger impact largely because it is not a particularly good portable videogame machine. Had Sony put the effort into it the PSP would have a larger library of good games, and in particular a library of unique 'portable gaming' content for the PSP, which would make the system sell far better.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

Is it my imagination or is Sony's strategy for their playstation line to attempt to make their product 'cool' rather than to make it a good product for gamers.

You repeat yourself. A 'good product for gamers' is intrinsically 'cool' , is it not? So yes I think they are aiming for that.

Over the life of the PSP it has been outsold by both the GBA and Nintendo DS and has failed to make a larger impact largely because it is not a particularly good portable videogame machine.

When Nintendo comes in 3rd place (GameCube), we rightly point to their streamlined operation and say this is fine, one need not dominate the entire marketplace to 'win' (which is an illusion anyway) as far as gamers are concerned; we like that they continue to produce great products and don't vanish in a sea of debt. To turn that around now and crow about the DS outselling the PSP by a wide margin is just a little two-faced. And we aren't even talking about PS2s, which clobber everything. See how this works? Don't give in to the fanboy one-upsmanship. Its pointless. I'm sure there are plenty of happy PSP owners out there, who the hell are you to tell them that they really don't like their game unit?

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[Short Circuit]

Nothing new. I distinctly remember ads piped into my middle-school homeroom that said, "Get N, or get out."

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[Thraxen]

Cool to the gamer, yes. 'Cool' to the general public, not necessarily.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[drinkypoo]

You repeat yourself. A 'good product for gamers' is intrinsically 'cool' , is it not? So yes I think they are aiming for that.

Uh, no. That's not how it works. A "cool" product has hype. It's been spun. People are convinced they need one. It's not because it's the best product! Although the best product can be cool. It's like, say, the difference between a logitech optical wheel mouse and a microsoft intellimouse optical. Sure, the microsoft mouse looks a little sexier. Sure, the in-store display is prettier. But it turns out that without the 17 megabyte driver the microsoft mouse is a little jumpy, and the build quality isn't as good. The intellimouse is "cooler". People don't talk about how cool their base logitech mouse is. But it's a better mouse. (A gaming product, if you will - I got one for gaming originally, no cleaning necessary.)

When Nintendo comes in 3rd place (GameCube), we rightly point to their streamlined operation and say this is fine, one need not dominate the entire marketplace to 'win' (which is an illusion anyway) as far as gamers are concerned; we like that they continue to produce great products and don't vanish in a sea of debt. To turn that around now and crow about the DS outselling the PSP by a wide margin is just a little two-faced.

Well, that depends on how much Sony is making or losing per PSP. It's an expensive little system to make and they've had to drop the price somewhat to remain competitive. The market has not embraced UMD movies and people tend to have vastly more games for their DSes than for their PSPs, possibly a result of the price of the system itself.

I'd want to know what sony makes per PSP before I passed judgement either way on this one.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[HappySqurriel]

When Nintendo comes in 3rd place (GameCube), we rightly point to their streamlined operation and say this is fine, one need not dominate the entire marketplace to 'win' (which is an illusion anyway) as far as gamers are concerned; we like that they continue to produce great products and don't vanish in a sea of debt. To turn that around now and crow about the DS outselling the PSP by a wide margin is just a little two-faced. And we aren't even talking about PS2s, which clobber everything. See how this works? Don't give in to the fanboy one-upsmanship. Its pointless. I'm sure there are plenty of happy PSP owners out there, who the hell are you to tell them that they really don't like their game unit?

You don't need to be the best selling videogame product to be considered a success, but you do need to have a lot of good videogames which the PSP really doesn't; the PSP has been on the market for almost 2 years and only has 1 game (Lumines) ranked at over 90% on gamerankings.com and only has 3 games to break a million sales worldwide (Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Ridge Racers, Everybodys Golf Portable) http://www.vgcharts.org/worldtotals.php?name=&cons ole=PSP&publisher=&sort=Total . [To put this in perspective, the XBox 360 in half the time has 4 games about 90% on Gamerankings.com, and 3 games to break a million sales worldwide]

The point I was trying to get at was the PSP is trying to be cool by pushing the non-gaming functions rather than make a solid gaming machine; Sony started with "Look it plays UMD movies and is a MP3 player", now that UMD failed I see far more comercials about the picture/move playback related to memorystick than game comercials. Had Sony focused on making good games, and encouraging developers to make games (that aren't Playstation/PS2 ports) for the PSP the system would be selling better because it was a better gaming machine.

The Gamecube/XBox were successful gaming platforms with small userbases because people who bought those systems where happy with their purchase and played (a lot of) games on the; many (if not most) PSP owners are unhappy because they own an expensive paperweight.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[Total_Wimp]

I try not to get pissed reading /. and I'm not sure why this post is an exception. Perhaps the post itself is innocent/naive enough, but it was the "informative" mods that set me over the edge.

#1. Everyone in gaming wants you to think their stuff if cool. Everyone. It's nice if the reason you think it's cool has something to do with quality, but in the end, that's not an absolute necessity. Question, which one was it, the GBA, or the DS that Nintendo purposely set out to look uncool? Neither? Well, thank you for entering reality. (BTW ads showing sweater-wearing yuppies smiling and laughing while they play with their Wii are very, very cool, if you're a sweater wearing yuppie.)

#2. The PSP is a fucking awesome game machine. It also happens to be a passable music and movie player. Don't let your prejudices prevent you from being honest about this. In playability, in fun, in versatility, it god-damn rocks. Is it better than the DS? I'm not gonna touch that with a thousand foot pole, not the least because I don't happen to own a DS and thus would not be able to make a fair comparison. However, even if the DS were ten times better than the PSP, that DOES NOT mean the PSP "is not a particularly good portable videogame machine." Say what you want about the relative merits of the two, but you are smoking crack or worse if you think the PSP is actually bad for playing games.

#3. I'm sick and tired of this "the DS sells better" crap. Do you live in Japan? What was that answer? Say it a little louder for us here in the U.S.? That's what I thought. Though /. has an international readership, the vast majority of readers are Americans. This is the score in America:

Wikipedia says that, "On December 1, 2006 Nintendo of America released launch-to-date information indicating that the Nintendo DS had sold 6.63 million units in the United States." Nice numbers. Wish I sold that many of the Total_Wimp Portable Game Console.

However, according to Sony, they had shipped close to that number, 6.39 million units, by the end of March and had exceeded that number, 7.57 million, by the end of June. The number shipped by the end of September was 9.57 million.

Two points here. One, I absolutely know that number shipped does not equal number sold. I am also not a moron enough to think that Sony didn't sell all the stock it sent back in April and July by Dec 1. Yes, I freely admit that I do not know the exact number of units Sony sold by Dec 1, but despite whatever you may think of them, they're not quite stupid enough to ship 3 million more units into a market that can't sell that last 6 million units it sent. It's time for you all to admit it, Sony has sold more PSPs in the US than Nintendo sold DSs. And it's done that despite Nintendos very significant lead in release date.

Point two. Who cares about the fact that Nintendo outsells the Sony in Japan. I'm sure the game designers do. I'm sure the Japanese do. But the last time I was in the store and decided to give the DS another shot, I was greeted by Elite Beat Agents, an anime inspired game that featured "yelling guy", "frantic gut" and a whole lot of other anime stereotypes that I've been actively trying to avoid now for several years. My daughter loves this stuff. I'd buy it for her in a heart beat (or an "Elite Beat". Har! I crack myself up!) But if I never see another sweat drop, bloody nose or chibi, it'll be too soon. So why, may I ask, would I want to encourage the game designers to be making more games specifically tailored to the Japanese taste? Heck, as far as I'm concerned, it's a blessing the PSP isn't selling as well in Japan. Game designers will need to cater to their core audience and for the moment, that audience looks American

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

Uh, no. That's not how it works. A "cool" product has hype. It's been spun. People are convinced they need one. It's not because it's the best product!

Hmm, I guess it depends on your personal definition. Personally, I separate 'cool' from 'hyped' but perhaps you have a point as far as the general public goes.

Well, that depends on how much Sony is making or losing per PSP. It's an expensive little system to make and they've had to drop the price somewhat to remain competitive. The market has not embraced UMD movies and people tend to have vastly more games for their DSes than for their PSPs, possibly a result of the price of the system itself.

Hard to say - I don't think its that expensive. They've had the PS2 guts down to a single chip for a while now (since the ill-fated PSX at least), and LCDs/memorycards have plummeted. The UMD has not been accepted for movies really but it doesn't matter - have DS cartridges been 'embraced by the market'? I can't do anything with those. In this sense the fact that UMD movies tanked doesn't matter; if Sony had shipped games on memorystick we wouldn't even be having this conversation. It becomes yet another specialized game delivery format just like we've had forever in nintendo cartridges, turbografx PCM cards, crazy reverse-spinning black PS1 CDs, etc.

I'd want to know what sony makes per PSP before I passed judgement either way on this one.

I see this quite a lot, and you know, I really don't understand why you would care. Sony and Nintendo and MS can lose money all day, in as many ways as they can think of - its their problem to be profitable. All I care about, as a 'gamer', is the games; ancillary conern about the financial health of the console's parent company is only interesting insofar as I don't want to buy into a platform lacking suffcient catalog. But thats it. Besides, with an entity like Sony its practically impossible to calculate anyways.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

You don't need to be the best selling videogame product to be considered a success, but you do need to have a lot of good videogames which the PSP really doesn't; the PSP has been on the market for almost 2 years and only has 1 game (Lumines) ranked at over 90% on gamerankings.com and only has 3 games to break a million sales worldwide

Not over 90, sure. But your comparison is one-sided. Here is the data from metacritic:

PSP Top 10 With Scores

1. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops - 89%
2 Lumines- 89%
3 WipEout Pure - 88%
4 Tekken: Dark Resurrection - 88%
5 Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories - 88%
6 Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children - 88%
7 Ridge Racer - 88%
8 Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror - 87%
9 Burnout Legends - 86%
10 Daxter - 86%

Now look at the DS:

1. Mario Kart DS - 91%
2 Advance Wars: Dual Strike - 90%
3 Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - 89%
4 New Super Mario Bros. - 89%
5 Meteos - 88%
6 Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan - 88%
7 Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin - 87%
8 Elite Beat Agents - 87%
9 Kirby: Canvas Curse - 86%
10 Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time - 86%

So you see, they are incredibly close. The DS sells a hell of a lot more than the PSP; it is cheaper, and appeals more to children and women. This is all great for Nintendo, and they have a kickass platform.

But I really think you ought not make such an overtly subjective judgement on the PSP as a failed platform with 'no good games' - again, I would point to the scores and say the PSP owners seem to have plenty to pick from that they are happy with. Conversely, I look at the DS games and I'm uninterested; I don't think they are bad games by any means, but to put it bluntly Mario and Kirby don't do anything for me. I'm just not interested. But that is my subjective opinion, I would not presume to call it a failure. I know its not.

Had Sony focused on making good games, and encouraging developers to make games (that aren't Playstation/PS2 ports) for the PSP the system would be selling better because it was a better gaming machine.

Come on. Mario Kart is not a port? Castlevania, not a port? Again I'm not slamming the DS, I like the DS, but the games have limited appeal for me. The PSP seems to have limited appeal for you. Subjective. The DS 'wins' in pure sales, if you care about that.

The Gamecube/XBox were successful gaming platforms with small userbases because people who bought those systems where happy with their purchase and played (a lot of) games on the; many (if not most) PSP owners are unhappy because they own an expensive paperweight.

The Xbox has never been successful financially, perhaps the quarter that Halo 2 was released, but thats it. The GameCube was a 'failure' by your own definition! There are more PSPs in the world than GameCubes!

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[drinkypoo]

I don't actually care all that much, all I'm saying is that I wouldn't want to try to make a comparison of success without knowing what each platform costs to put on the shelf and how many games are sold for each (on average) as well.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[brkello]

I think Sony's strategy is to sell the PSP...just like Nintendo's strategy with the DS and GBA. You are wrong and you are right. The PSP is an excellent gaming machine. There just hasn't been a hit/must-have game to come out on it. Nintendo has a lot more control since it has a lot stronger first party development than Sony. Every idiot on this forum knows that the games sell the product. You somehow think Sony doesn't know this? All they can really do is try to sell as many portables as possible making it an attractive environment for developers. And then hope one of those developers come up with a hit.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[twistedsymphony]

What a company makes on their base unit DOES matter because that situation effects their other decisions.

For instance if A console maker looses a large amount of money on the system then they're more likely to lock down the accessories to proprietary devices rather then utilizing widely accepted standards. Similarly if they need to make money back on the console they'd most likely go for Quantity over Quality of the games... while a company that makes money from the sale of their console can afford to concentrate more on quality titles and they can afford to test the waters and go out on a limb with more innovative titles.

If you NEED to make money on the games not just to improve profits but to bring you above breaking even, then you're likely to take the safe route, go with what works, and get it done quick. The result is gamers get generic mass-market garbage for games, instead of titles that innovate and move the industry forward. I'm not saying it the only factor but it's certainly a contributer.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[HappySqurriel]

Not over 90, sure. But your comparison is one-sided. Here is the data from metacritic:

Actually, if you noticed I was pretty balanced and looked at both game sales and game ratings; the fact is that game reviews are largely subjective and represent how well a game apeals to the core-gamer demographic, game sales represent how a game apeals to to the masses. I also have been trying not to directly compare the PSP to the Nintendo DS, mainly because the Nintendo DS is one of the fastest selling consoles in the history of videogames (because of it's performance in Japan).

I also (initially) made sure I referenced that the PSP was lacking in good "portable" games which (for the most part) was not understood by you. The fact is that the vast majority of handheld owners play games in a very different fashion to people who play games at home; traditionally they play in shorter bursts, and they also really like 2d content (most of the people I know who are big portable gamers became so after 2D games were abandoned on home consoles).

Oh yeah and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a movie ...

Come on. Mario Kart is not a port? Castlevania, not a port? Again I'm not slamming the DS, I like the DS, but the games have limited appeal for me. The PSP seems to have limited appeal for you. Subjective. The DS 'wins' in pure sales, if you care about that.

I'll give you Mario Kart, but the difference between the DS and the PSP is the PSP is similar enough to the PS2 that it has recieved (more or less) direct ports from the PS2; most DS games are drastically different than their Gamecube (or other system) counter parts.

The Xbox has never been successful financially, perhaps the quarter that Halo 2 was released, but thats it. The GameCube was a 'failure' by your own definition! There are more PSPs in the world than GameCubes!

You keep jumping around on what you claim my definition of 'failure' is. My definition is essentially that the Gamecube/XBox were successful because they had several critically acclaimed software titles, and sold a reasonable ammount of software per console which imply that they were good systems to own; the PSP has not gotten to this point yet (it would be debatable to say whether the DS has either) and I think it would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[debus]

I bought a PSP a couple weeks ago and have been playing mostly golf on it since then but will definitly play the GTA games and some of the FPS games. It seems like a very cool device to me. The screen is excellent, the video/audio capabilities are cool. I commute to work on a train and having the option to play a game/listen to music/watch a video are all very appealing. It doesn't cost much more than an Ipod and can do sooooooo much more. I am surprised more people don't use them on the train.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[DrEldarion]

For instance if A console maker looses a large amount of money on the system then they're more likely to lock down the accessories to proprietary devices rather then utilizing widely accepted standards.

What, you mean like generic interfaces (USB, HDMI) that can accept generic accessories (plain cables, USB network adapters and whatnot) and even being allowed to install generic OSes (Linux) on your machine? The PS3 has the most generic stuff available out of any console I can remember. That hardly follows your example.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[feepness]

#2. The PSP is a fucking awesome game machine. It also happens to be a passable music and movie player. Don't let your prejudices prevent you from being honest about this. In playability, in fun, in versatility, it god-damn rocks. Is it better than the DS? I'm not gonna touch that with a thousand foot pole, not the least because I don't happen to own a DS and thus would not be able to make a fair comparison. However, even if the DS were ten times better than the PSP, that DOES NOT mean the PSP "is not a particularly good portable videogame machine." Say what you want about the relative merits of the two, but you are smoking crack or worse if you think the PSP is actually bad for playing games.

I bought a DS Lite because it was supposedly better. I sold it on Ebay and got a PSP... and couldn't be happier. Full widescreen I can watch self-encoded movies (not UMDs!)

If you fly and have ever watched a movie fiddling on your laptop you owe it to yourself to get a PSP. The screen is smaller than a laptop but bigger than everything else and it is so much damn easier since you don't have to pull the damn thing out of your carryon for the stormtroopers to examine!

And you get some killer games... LocoRoco anyone?

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[twistedsymphony]

Since when does
A console maker...more likely = Sony's PS3...Always?

I'd like to see you hunt down drivers for a USB wi-fi adapter that would let you play Resistance online. While you're at it throw a few PC USB controllers in there... better yet why don't you plug in a PS2 controller... how about cheaper 3rd party options? You can't do any of those things.

Just because a console is open in SOME respects doesn't mean it's open in ALL respects. It also doesn't mean that the methods in which they're closed aren't making them money. Sony, similar to MS is not allowing 3rd parties to make devices likes controller for a set period of time until they've made enough of a profit over their mini monopoly, in general though the PS3 is an exception due to the inclusion of Blu-Ray which Sony is banking on you buying movies in that format and making up their costs there as opposed to more traditional methods such as accessory sales. Hence why my statement was not all inclusive, because it can't be stated all inclusively.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[Breakfast Pants]

In this sense the fact that UMD movies tanked doesn't matter You'd be right, if it didn't make them make other compromises. For one thing putting in the drive in that tiny space wasn't cheap. Second, the PSP suffers load times which are unacceptable on a handheld and the drive eats batteries like mad.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[ZackSchil]

The GC was cheaper than the competition and had occasional must-have titles. That's the best part about even Nintendo's biggest failures, they're usually lower priced and have enough good games from first party alone by mid-life to justify the purchase.

Sony isn't exactly a powerhouse developer and their hardware is more expensive. Sony platforms live or die by third party support and for whatever reason, the software sales never came and 3rd party support is drying up. Calling the PSP a dead platform is a little premature but I don't think being very concerned for its future is unjustified.

Ok, fine, the glee with which people make this analysis smacks of fanboyism, but the analysis its self isn't wrong or hypocritical.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

You'd be right, if it didn't make them make other compromises. For one thing putting in the drive in that tiny space wasn't cheap. Second, the PSP suffers load times which are unacceptable on a handheld and the drive eats batteries like mad.

I agree. It would be nice to see a PSP 'lite' that was thinner, smaller overall (same rez screen), that omitted the UMD entirely. Its really not necessary. (Although Memorystick media was not nearly so cheap when it launched, it is now.)

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

I'd like to see you hunt down drivers for a USB wi-fi adapter that would let you play Resistance online. While you're at it throw a few PC USB controllers in there... better yet why don't you plug in a PS2 controller... how about cheaper 3rd party options? You can't do any of those things.

These are bad examples. You can just plug in a standard USB wireless 'game adapter' and configure it from a PC, works like a charm. Buddy of mine did exactly this. You can plug in a keyboard and mouse and they work on things that support it (the OS does). You can plug in a PS2 controller, there are legacy ports.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

Actually, if you noticed I was pretty balanced and looked at both game sales and game ratings; the fact is that game reviews are largely subjective and represent how well a game apeals to the core-gamer demographic, game sales represent how a game apeals to to the masses.

I'm sorry, no, I don't see this. This is just cherry-picking one figure and now you are moving the goalposts. You brought up the game reviews first, but lets let that pass.

I also have been trying not to directly compare the PSP to the Nintendo DS, mainly because the Nintendo DS is one of the fastest selling consoles in the history of videogames (because of it's performance in Japan).

Really?

In your very first message, you said:

Over the life of the PSP it has been outsold by both the GBA and Nintendo DS and has failed to make a larger impact largely because it is not a particularly good portable videogame machine.

.. which is what I was responding to.

I also (initially) made sure I referenced that the PSP was lacking in good "portable" games which (for the most part) was not understood by you. The fact is that the vast majority of handheld owners play games in a very different fashion to people who play games at home; traditionally they play in shorter bursts, and they also really like 2d content (most of the people I know who are big portable gamers became so after 2D games were abandoned on home consoles).

I was perhaps not clear enough. What I disagree with is not your 'portable' classification, but rather the assumed superiority for all people. The DS is designed around this quick-play ethic. The PSP is not, nor does it really proport to be. It is called a Playstation Portable after all. I think what you are missing is that some people really do want their PS2 in their pocket, there seems to be a market for it. Not nearly as big as the market for the DS of course; but again I would point to the product names and note that the DS is not a GameCube portable. Do you take my meaning? The DS is simply not hands-down better for all humans across the board, that is disingenuous. There's room for many devices frankly.

Oh yeah and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a movie ...

My mistake.

I'll give you Mario Kart, but the difference between the DS and the PSP is the PSP is similar enough to the PS2 that it has recieved (more or less) direct ports from the PS2; most DS games are drastically different than their Gamecube (or other system) counter parts.

Think I covered this above.

You keep jumping around on what you claim my definition of 'failure' is. My definition is essentially that the Gamecube/XBox were successful because they had several critically acclaimed software titles, and sold a reasonable ammount of software per console which imply that they were good systems to own; the PSP has not gotten to this point yet (it would be debatable to say whether the DS has either) and I think it would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Your definition is just completely arbitrary then - because its not sales, and its not reviews, and its not number of titles. We've covered all of this, that's why I posted the metacritic data. The Xbox and GameCube are only successful in building brand awareness (former) and making a modest profit (GameCube). Don't get me wrong, they're both good systems, and had some great games, but really - both portables have been out over a year, I don't think its premature to compare the merits, as we have just done.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[DrXym]

Is it my imagination or is Sony's strategy for their playstation line to attempt to make their product 'cool' rather than to make it a good product for gamers.

The PSP is a good product for gamers. In fact it's an EXCELLENT product. That's not to say it doesn't have faults, but mostly its been blighted by too many bad PS2 ports, shoddy "team B" franchise efforts, unoptimised loading times and not enough titles aimed at truly portable gaming. As it happens despite that it has built some excellent titles and especially in the last 12 months or so.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[thatguywhoiam]

Sony isn't exactly a powerhouse developer and their hardware is more expensive.

You think? Not sure I agree, seems like they put out a lot of hits... they are not as strong with 1st party stuff as Nintendo, but its not hard to think of huge games released by Sony: Gran Turismo, Shadow of the Colossus, the Wipeout series, God of War, etc.

Re:Trying to make it 'cool'

[rjung2k]

"Come on. Mario Kart is not a port?"

Eight-player simultaneous play on WiFi and internet? Sixteen all-new tracks? New weapons and tactics? A sequel, sure, but calling it a "port" is selling the game short.

This Just In.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Marketroids are duplicitous, unscuplulous, charlatans. In a related story, if you thought the campaign wasn't funded by Sony, you are a burden on your society and should be terminated for the good of all. News at 11.

Re:This Just In.

[voice_of_all_reason]

Marketroids are duplicitous, unscuplulous, charlatans

Not to mention you're fucked without the ice beam.

Re:This Just In.

[geminidomino]

The fact that this is only scored at 3 makes me feel very, very old...

What is going on?

[mgblst]

Sorry, I am not quite clear on what Sony has done wrong? They paid someone to help them advertise the PSP. The advertises did this by attempting to create a viral campaign. Ok, so beside the fact that this is clearly not aimed at slashdotters or the other people who seem to be getting upset about it, why is this a problem?

Don't get me wrong, I will never by a PSP or another sony product again (the cameras were ok), for the many attrocties they have done on the buying product (and I don't count the price of the PS3 amoung them), but lets stop knocking them for every little thing they do.

Re:What is going on?

[eldavojohn]

What is going on?

Well, there's nothing wrong on the surface. It's just that the consumer doesn't 'know' that it's Sony's marketing blitz. Sony is probably doing it out of pure motive of trying to gather interest and make the news (mission accomplished--see article). But there are some people that don't like being lied to regardless of the conditions.

As consumers we feel we have a right to know where our advertisements are coming from. When we don't know who's advertising what, we get annoyed. Some of us even associate it with evil like SPAM marketers.

Essentially what it comes down to is Sony trying to present third party opinions of their products but not only are these opinions biased and untrue--they may be monetarily compensated for saying these things. They essentially lose 'street cred' among gamers. They aren't doing anything illegal, they're just using tricky marketing tactics that make the news. Some people hate it, some people might gobble it right up. Either way, I just spent two minutes talking about it to you.

Re:What is going on?

[faloi]

Don't get me wrong, I will never by a PSP or another sony product again (the cameras were ok), for the many attrocties they have done on the buying product (and I don't count the price of the PS3 amoung them), but lets stop knocking them for every little thing they do.

What's next? Stop saying that everything Microsoft does is wrong?!?! This is Slashdot, hyperbole rules!

Re:What is going on?

[duffbeer703]

Why do you think Google bought YouTube anyway? Its a platform for delivering non-traditional advertising.

You might have noticed that almost every IT rag & business magazine has been talking about the tremendous marketing potential of YouTube in the last few months. This isn't an accident -- YouTube was designed to deliver ads in the form of TV show clips and promotional videos like Sony's.

The user-generated content is a sideshow or trojan horse to hide the real content.

Re:What is going on?

[Animaether]

What's 'wrong' is that some Slashdot visitors have uninformed outrage due to the assumption that other companies aren't doing the exact same thing.

This sort of thing was even on the national news a few months back - people who got paid to review products and post about it on Forums. But the company behind it was 'reputable' - they wouldn't post fake reviews. On the other hand, if the reviewer didn't like the product - they simply wouldn't post much at all.

It's happening all the time, and all over the place... better get used to it instead of getting all bent out of shape, I say.

Re:What is going on?

[Umbrae]

Ugh, I don't know how people could go to this website ( http://www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/ ) and -not- understand that it's a huge marketing scam. An obvious over-usage of '1337', obviously intentional misspellings, and very direct marketing material.

Re:What is going on?

[voice_of_all_reason]

Take a look at it this way. I, as an exec at Gamestop, create a viral campaign that states Barbie's Horse Adventures is a Halo-killer and we can't even keep it on the shelves. Sony orders another 5 million units made to replace my stock... which I don't purchase because I know people will wise up soon. However, the plan works like a charm for me clearing out my stock.

Perfectly legal, I imagine. But do you think Sony would like it?

Re:What is going on?

[Krotos]

It's happening all the time, and all over the place... better get used to it instead of getting all bent out of shape, I say.

Er. . .huh? Just because it's increasingly common doesn't mean we shouldn't get pissed off at it -- indeed, that may be a good reason to be more pissed off at it.

The push to teach creationism in public schools is a growing trend too. Should we be blasé about that?

Re:What is going on?

[Chris Pimlott]

Just because someone is bad at lying to you doesn't mean you should excuse their attempts to lie.

Re:What is going on?

[heinousjay]

So a company advertising its product is worthy of anger? What a bizarre outlet. Why does it deserve a strong emotion? I find ignoring it works just as well and expends less energy.

Re:What is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry, I am not quite clear on what Sony has done wrong?"

Never stopped Zonk before.

Re:What is going on?

[mgblst]

How the hell does this compare to Sony pretending to be a couple of teenagers? How does this even make any sense at all?

Do you get upset everytime someone has an add on tv, where they hire actors to pretend to take out a home loan? Or buy a car? I understand this is taking it to the next level - a little bit - , but is not really that different.

Re:What is going on?

[mgblst]

Yeah, I can see this argument if Sony wrote an editorial for a newspaper, or hired a radio personality to read out a prepared statement. But in this case, they are pretending to be a couple of teenage nobodies.

If you don't like being lied to, then I suggest you never watch TV, never read a newspaper or magazine, or go to an internet site with advertising. Seriously, what is the line between advertising and lying?

Re:What is going on?

[Umbrae]

Hm. Good point. I'd mod you up if I could.

Re:What is going on?

[BenjyD]

Seriously, what is the line between advertising and lying?
In most countries, the difference is that adverts have to be clearly distinguished as adverts.

Re:What is going on?

[BenjyD]

Is it really that hard for people to see the difference between paid advertising, clearly labelled as such, and advertising masquerading as unpaid content?

Re:What is going on?

[soft_guy]

So a company advertising its product is worthy of anger? What a bizarre outlet. Why does it deserve a strong emotion? I find ignoring it works just as well and expends less energy. Lots of people here aren't angry. They just think this ad campaign is stupid. And some people are probably saddened because Sony used to be a great company and also Sony could do better than this.

Re:What is going on?

[Serengeti]

"Viral" doesn't necessarily mean that it was apparently made by amateur video makers. Most "viral" videos I remember were either clear in origin or non commercial.

This, and other such marketing ploys like that of the oil companies a year ago, is subversive and attempts to circumvent the viewers sense of distrust for typical commercials. If you don't find any of that offensive, I'd be surprised.

Re:What is going on?

[hunterkll]

Look at the source, what the FUCK is that huge block of nonsense?!

Re:What is going on?

[Krotos]

No, a company deceptively advertising its product is worthy of anger. I don't mind straightforward, candid advertising -- well, actually I do, but I mind it a lot less. If you see a TV commercial or a web ad, you know it's being paid for by the company that made the product and can therefore treat its claims with appropriate skepticism. You can even, as you recommended, ignore it. With viral marketing, you're led to believe that people with no connection to the company are independently praising its product. You therefore might be more inclined to believe what they're saying. You don't know that you should ignore it.

Viral marketing is deception, pure and simple. I don't know about you, but I don't like being deceived.

Re:What is going on?

[angelasmark]

"As consumers we feel we have a right to know where our advertisements are coming from. When we don't know who's advertising what, we get annoyed. Some of us even associate it with evil like SPAM marketers."

Where do we get this mysterious right to know who is saying what? I like the theory that we can communicate anonymously on the Internet. If we want free anonymous speech, we can't complain when people/companies start using that to their advantage.

Re:What is going on?

[Peter Mork]

They aren't doing anything illegal, they're just using tricky marketing tactics that make the news.

Well, according to an article in today's Washington Post, it might very well be illegal. The FTC is beginning to investigate viral marketing campaigns.

Re:What is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong is that the ad campaign is trying to spoof the viewer into thinking this is some other consumer's opinion, when in fact it is no such thing. It is the deception that is the problem.

Re:What is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's going on is that slashdot doesn't like sony. Anything remotely "bad" sony does is jumped on. I noticed this after only a few visits here. Slashdot loves nintendo, hates sony.

Re:What is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish people wouldn't use the word "viral" for shit like this. Viral marketing is where you compel *real people* to spread the word about your product by giving them *real incentive* to do so. All they did was hire an astrotufer to pretend to like their product, and then do..er...what exactly? This may get page views, but how many real people are going to actually respond to this? And how? If it doesn't ilicit response - response that builds interest in the campaign - it's not viral at all.

Marketers lie?

[Evro]

What next? Politicians who don't keep their campaign promises? What is this world coming to?

So What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, who cares. If it really was just some schmo who setup the site, why would it have an iota more credibility than anything else? Why does this matter to anyone who has half a brain (no, the other half).

Re:So What?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

" If it really was just some schmo who setup the site, why would it have an iota more credibility than anything else?"

Are you seriously asking why a satisfied customer would have an iota more credibility than a Sony paid advertisement?

"Viral campaign"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Sony, I don't think root kits *technically* count as viruses.

Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[aendeuryu]

This here's a must-read if you haven't read it yet... Bill Hicks's rant on marketing.

http://sennoma.net/main/edits/Hicks.html

This is how it starts... "By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself."

It only gets better.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[Anonymous Coward]

(This deserves to be posted directly)

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.

No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.

Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."

Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!

"Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing."

Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that."

God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.

"Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..."

How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?

"What didya do today honey?"

"Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight." [snores] "Yeah we just said you know is your baby really too loud? You know?" [snores] "Yeah, you know the mums will love it." [snores]

Sleep like fucking children, don't ya, this is your world isn't it?

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[sparkane]

The thought of Bill Hicks alive today, for the last six years, doing comedy making fun of the second Bush white house and making me piss in my pants with laughter.. So sad. And we thought he was funny in the 90s. Man, just think about it.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[jdcook]

Personally, I'm glad he's gone. If Bill were alive today, the idea of a second President Bush would have killed him.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[thesandtiger]

I'm glad he's dead, too. I mean, he was funny and all, but I really don't want to see some guy who's been decomposing for years walking about on stage. Rodney Dangerfield already did that bit.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[Chris Burke]

Very good point, and I agree. While we may all have suffered a great loss with his passing, for him, leaving this world before he had to experience the U.S. voting for G.W. twice was a kindness.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[operagost]

If he was really that good, he'd be to busy berating the pimpled basement-dwelling quasi-Marxist retards on Slashdot to bother with politics.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, he'd be real worried about Slashdot and whatever it is you think Marxist means. Uh huh.

I deduce that the phrase "if he was really that good" means that you've never actually heard any Bill Hicks. It's a shame, you really should, regardless of your own politics, because he doesn't spare anybody. Of course he's most brutal towards idiots, so you may just be offended.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't enjoy being sold all the time; Nevertheless, I've encountered situations where I need or could use a product I otherwise would not have known about were it not for the marketing. Sony's attempt may be evil, but not all marketing is.

Assuming you're a capitalist, it would be wonderful if people would make their own self-informed decisions and buy products without outside motivation, but it rarely works that way. Word of mouth can only go so far.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[sparkane]

Heh. I have to disagree, with respect. His point was basically that it's good that Bill's dead, because otherwise - he'd be dead!

Frankly I think we should vote Bill Hicks President. I think the fact that he deceased can be made a minor issue. The platform should be "Honesty In Politics".

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[Chris Burke]

His point was basically that it's good that Bill's dead, because otherwise - he'd be dead!

Yeah, but I bet he would have said something hilarious before his head exploded.

Re:Must read Bill Hicks anti-marketing rant

[Scudsucker]

Yup, I miss Bill. And I didn't even hear of him until after he was already dead for 10 years, except for that bit at the end of that Tool song. Stoopid cancer...

The best part...

[Otter]

My favorite part is:

you can always try to use this $249 bill to buy a psp entertainment pack for yourself. don't rlly try to use, though - if you do, you'll be playing it the next 5-10 years in cell block H!

Some poor lawyer had to pretend to be a subliterate 14-year-old while adding a disclaimer to that mess!

Re:The best part...

[Dutch_Cap]

Yes, lawyers hate it when they have to pretend to be human beings.

Re:The best part...

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely only butch australian women prisoners are in Cell Block H. Are they sony's target market?

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, give him a +1 obvious statement - apparently the article's authors didn't figure that one out.

The Apple way

[Opportunist]

I know I'll get tagged flamebait, troll and whatnot, but this is pretty much the way Apple's products are being marketed. The items are made "trendy", they are sold via the way of being "hip" and "cool", and that everyone wants one because they're hip and cool. How many ads do you know that talk about the features and unique things the iPod can do? How many of the accessoires that you can buy for it do really have additional value to it?

Aside from the ITMS, which a good deal of iPod users never touched, what's the advantage over other MP3 players on the market? I mean, technically, not from being "cool".

Now, I hate Sony maybe even MORE than the average /.er, I've had my share of problems and (needless) lawsuits with them. But what they do here is exactly what marketing is about today. Creating a hype. Making the product cool and thus making people want it. Not because it is technically superior or offers more utility than the competition, but simply because "so many say it's cool, so it's gotta be cool".

If you have an iPod, ask yourself why. Because you compared it and you actually found it REALLY superior to the other products in that market sector, or because someone told you it's cool and that you should have it? You needn't answer. Just ask yourself and try to be honest with yourself.

Re:The Apple way

[TubeSteak]

Sure, but IIRC, most companies do their advertising in an open and obvious fashion.

Sony isn't being criticized for trying to make their product hip & cool, but for being sneaky about it.

IMO, there are enough people out there that dislike advertising & marketing, to the point that most corporate sponsored "viral" campaigns will get their covers blown off fairly early.

Some people take satisfaction in unmasking 'dishonest' campaigns, others just don't like being manipulated.

Re:The Apple way

[urbanradar]

You seem to be missing the point. What's wrong isn't that Sony is trying to be cool. There's nothing wrong with that (even though it seems to have backfired horribly).

The difference is that Apple designates their adverts as such. When you watch/see an Apple ad, it's still clear that this is the company presenting itself to you. Sony wants you to believe it's not them presenting themselves to you but somebody else praising them to high heaven.

A company can go "Hello, we're Apple and we're really hip, just compare this personified PC with this personified mac!" all it wants. But it can't go "We're just a couple of random teenagers with no connection to Sony - but let's all buy PSPs!"

There still is a thin line between marketing and lying. A very thin line, yes, but it's nonetheless there.

Re:The Apple way

[JonLatane]

I know you said I needn't answer, but I feel that I should nonetheless. The reason I bought an iPod (an iPod nano, actually) is because of the simplicity of managing my music with iTunes. I had owned several Creative (and before that, Rio) players and after the last one broke I started looking more and more at iPods. Both their music management systems are bloated and buggy - say what you will about iTunes's memory footprint, it has never once crashed on me, and with 1GB of RAM the 40-50MB it takes while playing is inconsequential.

Its music management systems are sublime. I can make any playlist I want, and smart playlists, while not a new concept, are exceptionally simple in iTunes. Since I have over 30GB of music and a 4GB MP3 player, managing my music should have been horribly difficult - and it was, even when I had a 20GB Nomad Zen. However, I just have smart playlists set up that contain about 500MB of my least-listened-to, highest-rated songs, 3GB of my most-listened-to, highest-rated songs, 250MB of random stuff that I may just have not gotten around to rating, which I can rate when I hear it on my playlist and then re-sync with iTunes, and some extra space reserved for things like data and extra playlists (for example, I'm currently preparing to play piano for a production of Evita at UNC Chapel Hill, and I have the soundtrack in that extra space so I can make sure I've gotten to know the music).

This simplicity is added to the fact that there is essentially no better MP3 jukebox on Windows, Linux or Mac, at least none that I have found. Songbird may approach it someday (but man, if you want to talk about memory footprints...), and MusikCube is alright but not as simple. WMP is, of course, a joke.

So anyway, what I've been ranting about is that there are some very, very good reasons for the non-trendy, technical guy to buy an iPod.

The problem people have here is that Sony is attempting to market a bad product, with minimal software (well, aside from their perpetual anti-homebrew updates, if you call that software), to people who aren't familiar enough with it (parents, grandparents, etc.) to understand that it's so terrible. The desire for iPods developed before I ever saw an ad by Apple, whereas Sony is trying to create such desire.

Re:The Apple way

[TomHandy]

I get the impression you weren't actually looking for responses, but I'll go ahead and tell you.

I have personally never purchased an iPod because it was "hip" or "cool". Before I owned an iPod, my primary MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500. I recall also having looked at things like the Creative Nomad Jukebox, which appealed to me because of their capacity, but I didn't like the size or the navigation. I remember trying out the Nomad Jukebox, and finding it to be kind of a pain to navigate around, etc. And as I recall, there wasn't much in the way of good software for it either, but I never used it personally, so I can't say for sure.

When the iPod first came out, I actually didn't buy one right away, but a few things appealed to me when I tried it out in stores, etc. The first was the scrollwheel, which to this day I still consider a significant technical advantage over other mp3 players. I've tried a ton of other players, and I just prefer the navigation scheme of the iPod. I'm not going to say it's "better", as there are certainly other perfectly good navigation schemes out there (one of my friends has one of the newer Samsung Flash players and I thought the navigation was pretty solid on that as well), but I've found it to be the most natural for me.

The size of course also appealed to me, as the main reason I didn't buy the Jukebox was that it was about as big as a CD player, and I wanted something closer in size to my Rio 500. The iPod definitely fit the bill in that regard.

Finally, the iTunes synching appealed to me a great deal. One of the things I never really liked with the Rio 500 was just the whole idea that I had to drag music manually back and forth, and it was never really convenient.

I've found the iTunes/iPod combination to be really good for me personally, because I like being able to just create playlists or sync my entire library, and have the exact same music setup on my personal music player as I do on my desktop computer. I know that some people prefer just manually organizing their music on their mp3 player, but I personally like the sync concept. I remember the other annoyance I used to have was that if I got rid of an album or song on my computer, I had to also remember to remove it from my mp3 player as well. With iTunes library synching, this is no longer an issue for me.

And yes, generally speaking, I like the design of the iPod. That's certainly a factor for me too. I currently have an 8GB second generation Nano, which might be my favorite iPod yet because it has enough storage to let me carry a lot of my music with me, while also being small enough that I take it with me just about everywhere (something which I didn't always do with the larger hard drive-based iPods).

On to your larger point; Apple has certainly had a pretty effective advertising campaign, but I would argue that it's been pretty minimalist, all things being equal. Really, when you think about it, the iPod ads, for the most part, are advertising the primary "feature" of the iPod; using it to listen to music.

I don't think this is so crazy; I know that a lot of people say "Oh, the iPod doesn't have all these advanced features that my music player does", but I can at least personally say that I am someone who bought the iPod primarily to listen to music, and I don't think it's crazy to have an ad campaign centered around that.

The thing with the iPod though is that in large part it has become something that sells itself. You can only get so far on creating a "hip" image for a product, if the product itself is no good. If the iPod itself were just a fad, it would have died out by this point, because people wouldn't keep buying new iPods.

I certainly acknowledge that my case is not necessarily representative of all iPod buyers, and I do know that there are people out there who buy iPods more for status symbols, etc. or just because of that perceived notion of "hipness". But that is also something that probably goes beyond just advertisin

Re:The Apple way

[tzhuge]

I have to respond to this because it's a criticism of the iPod that comes up over and over again and it really isn't justified. I'm the kind of person who reads up extensively on a product before buying anything. When I got my 3rd gen iPod I looked at several alternatives and at the time the iPod was quite clearly the best product of its type.

A while after that, Apple's competitors released a slew of iPod-killer products and I suffered quite a bit from buyers remorse. There were all these players from Creative and iRiver that had superior features and cost less. I pretty much felt that anyone who bought an iPod at that point was a tool... until I got my hands on an iRiver HP20 or whatever. Boy did the interface on that thing ever suck; it was just pathetic how many controls were on the thing just so you could browse a few menus. I'm sure it was a great MP3 player for some people. It had FM tuner, better audio quality, manage your own music instead of using iTunes, etc. I have tried a few other hd players as well, Rio, Creative, etc. and they all had areas that were weaker than iPods and areas that were stronger.

I guess my point is don't dismiss the iPod as the inferior but trendy product. The iPod's popularity is deserved. It has the best controls and interface in the market and for the vast majority of people it is a better product. It may not be the best product for you but that doesn't make you any more savvy.

Re:The Apple way

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'll get tagged flamebait, troll and whatnot, but this is pretty much the way Apple's products are being marketed.

Funny, I thought it was those Mac vs. PC ads starring the guy from the Daily Show and some guy who might be trying to be the Fonz or not.

The items are made "trendy", they are sold via the way of being "hip" and "cool", and that everyone wants one because they're hip and cool.

The latter part isn't why I bought one, but I'm not mainstream, so I might not count as part of "everyone."

How many ads do you know that talk about the features and unique things the iPod can do?

Good point, but Apple didn't have to create fake people to generate buzz. Their style was to create an artistic commercial that would make people curious; then people would start saying, "WTF is this iPod?" and go find out for themselves. No Astroturfing was needed. It hearkens back to their 1984 commercial, which said nothing of the Mac's technical merits.

Aside from the ITMS, which a good deal of iPod users never touched, what's the advantage over other MP3 players on the market? I mean, technically, not from being "cool".

• It has a simple user interface.
• It does what I want.
• It doesn't go doing things I don't want.
• It just works with my Mac.
• I wanted something to play MP3s in my ten year old car, which just has a tape deck in the stereo, and I didn';t want to jump through hoops to do it.

I'm not out to be elite; I just want to listen to some music and not have to pull out a manual to tell me how to turn off some radio thingamajig so the batteries last longer. Your mileage may vary.

But what they do here is exactly what marketing is about today. Creating a hype. Making the product cool and thus making people want it. Not because it is technically superior or offers more utility than the competition, but simply because "so many say it's cool, so it's gotta be cool".

Of course; because utility and technical superiority is engineering, not marketing. Also, please do not confuse technical superiority with having a bigger features list. It's not the size of the wave.

If you have an iPod, ask yourself why. Because you compared it and you actually found it REALLY superior to the other products in that market sector, or because someone told you it's cool and that you should have it? You needn't answer. Just ask yourself and try to be honest with yourself.

See above. What's even better is that I don't have to diss someone else's music player to enjoy mine.

Re:The Apple way

[Triv]

No, no, NO.

The difference is, when Apple advertises to you, it's through a television in a situation where being advertised to is accepted, obvious and transparent. Sony hiring some douchebag to PRETEND to be a fifteen-year-old boy to generate buzz for the PSP is deceptive, crude, egomaniacal, dishonest and vulgar. I work in marketing and I say this: if my company ever tried to pull off some shit like this, the backlash from the staff would be extreme.

There really is such a thing as GOOD marketing, even morally aware marketing. This ISN'T it.

Re:The Apple way

[EzraSj]

but this is pretty much the way Apple's products are being marketed. The items are made "trendy", they are sold via the way of being "hip" and "cool", and that everyone wants one because they're hip and cool. How many ads do you know that talk about the features and unique things the iPod can do? How many of the accessoires that you can buy for it do really have additional value to it?

Ugh. Talk about missing the point. The issue with this advertising method is not that it appeals to peoples sense of 'cool' or 'trendiness'. Every company on the planet tries to appeal to the cool factor in every advertisement! Have you seen a coke commercial lately? A car commercial? A cell phone commercial? Appealing to hipness is not the relevant issue here, since sony and every other company under the sun already does this.

The issue here is that Sony is straight up lying in order to create this hype. They've created a website through a third party that is almost certainly meant to deceive parts of their target audience into thinking it is real and NOT an advertisement. The difference is analogous to buying an ad on the side of a bus (something that makes itself obvious as an advertisement) and paying some kids to talk loudly about the next great product from company X while sitting on the bus. One is clearly marked, the other is not.

Think about it this way. If this was really a 'viral marketing' scheme aimed at us savvy gamers who are tasked with 'figuring it out' then they failed miserably, since it takes us about .085 seconds to realize this is all BS, and its also just pissing most of us off. There's nothing to figure out - its clearly a lie. But for those webusers who aren't as able to differentiate between fact and fiction (some of us might know them as the majority), this would be a useful and deceptive hype building tool. And that is what is wrong with this. It isnt about what they're trying to accomplish, its about how they're doing it.

Re:The Apple way

[MeanderingMind]

I think there's an important distinction to be made.

It is true that what Apple does with the iPod, making it cool, is what Sony is trying to do with the PSP. I don't think we can argue that point. However, their methods and the success thereof are quite different.

There's a very different feel to the approaches to both companies. Apple isn't exploiting subcultures and trends to advertise the iPod. They don't use 1337 h4x or urban themes to sell their product. They make their own ads, and make them cool. The problem with Sony's PSP advertisements is that they're trying to make the PSP cool by linking it to other things that are already considered cool (at least by marketers), rather than marketing it as cool unto itself. The side effect of Sony's strategy is that it ends up being rather misleading, underhanded and generally poorly received.

The PSP should be able to be cool on it's own, which Sony's marketers seem to have forgotten in lieu of the latest marketing trends.

Re:The Apple way

[archeopterix]

But what they do here is exactly what marketing is about today. Creating a hype. Making the product cool and thus making people want it.

Yeah... except the whole affair is not about creating hype. Creating hype is fair game. Creating a fake fan site and fake fan videos is not. There is a line between a 15-year old actor saying he "luvs psp" in an ad on tv (in most civilized countries ads must be clearly flagged as such in newspapers and TV) and a 30+ marketeer pretending he is an actual 15-year old who created a fan site.

Re:The Apple way

[soft_guy]

I could have posted this because not only do I feel the exact same way as this guy, I agree with every point he makes and ALSO my first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500. And I currently own 1 iPod - a 20GB 2nd Gen. I bought this iPod before iPods were cool, before the iTunes Music Store, before iTunes for Windows. I remember people asking me what it was. I'd buy a new iPod, but the one I have works really well and I prefer the firewire port on it to the dock port on the new ones.

Frankly, I was very surprised that the iPod became such a major hit because Apple had made a lot of similar products over the years that weren't successful. (Newton, QuickTake cameras, etc.) But one thing I did know when I bought my iPod was that Apple would get the software right. They almost always get the software right.

Re:The Apple way

[Khuffie]

WMP is, of course, a joke.

Can I ask: Have you tried windows media player 11? I agree anything before that was a complete joke, but I find WMP11 to be far superior to them, including iTunes (in fact, many have said that iTunes 7 has taken some ideas from WMP11). And it plays well with MP3 players too. Before I had to use a crappy custom software to put songs in my Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, but now WMP11 detects it as an MP3 player when I plug it in and lets me sync playlists/add music to it all I like.

Re:The Apple way

[Opportunist]

That's exactly the reason why they resort to this kind of tactic.

Actually it's two reasons: First of all, more and more people know that ads tell them bollocks and turn to their peers (or, in the days of the net, other people using the product) for information about the product. They don't trust the ads, the trust their peers' opinion.

And second, they don't trust the Sony ads twice as much as they already loathe being plastered by marketing. Apple has a good rep amongst its users. It has that intrinsic "cool" tag attached to it. Sony is suffering from a lot of blunders, with the rootkit on the CDs only being the tip of the iceberg. I can honestly say I know nobody who didn't have some sort of negative experience with Sony. So simply going "we are cool" will at best get a "yeah, sure" reaction. People don't believe in Sony ads anymore. They expect to be lied to by the company.

So Sony has to resort to sneakier tactics to get people to believe their products are cool. Once the rep is ruined, the brand follows.

And I can't say I'd shed a tear.

Re:The Apple way

[greysky]

What the iPod has over other music players -

1- A wider selection of accessories to choose from. The installed user base for iPods is so dominant that the selection of accessories dwarf all other players *combined*.
2- An intuitive, well-thought-out user interface that nearly anyone can use.
3- Syncing software that doesn't require the user to understand the ins-and-outs of software configuration to use. Just plug it in and it syncs right up. I know non-geeks that refuse to buy an iPod because they don't own an Apple computer, so they figure it won't be fully compatible. They go through player after player returning them because they can't get them to work right. I'll show them how they work, they don't get it, so I tell them to buy an iPod, and they go get something else.

Re:The Apple way

[false1]

i bought my iPod cause I'm a Mac user and Apple's is the only player that caters to Mac users. Without iTunes there would be no online store for Mac users at all. I also liked firewire. Before USB 2 people were forced to sync there portables with slow as dirt USB1, remember that?. AAC is a good, non proprietary upgrade to MP3. I refuse to use Winblows Media. Microsofts WMP for Mac blows chunks. Atrac, Real and the rest are proprietary. Ogg is compatible with what? At least iPod is cross platform (sorry Linex users). The UI is functional, the prices are in line with other players and there is a plethora third party devices and tie ins. iPod in your car, on the plane, etc. I also carry my files back and forth to the job by using it's hard drive capabilty. You may not prefer the iPod but to pretend that those that do are all sheeple is just dumb.

Re:The Apple way

[mhazen]

I actually spent three months trying out over 15 different players hands-on, including driving 80 miles to a larger metro area one day to try several stores. I'm not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but the iPod was miles ahead of other portables in terms of its physical and software interfaces (two years ago, don't know if others have passed it since).

Don't assume you're the only person who makes informed decisions, because lo and behold most of us actually do.

And if Apple had done anything remotly like this sort of crap, I'd never have bought an iPod, regardless of how good it was.

Much like I'll never buy a PSP.

Re:The Apple way

[J-Doggqx]

"If you have an iPod, ask yourself why."

I have an iPod because all of the other MP3 players at the time came with a microphone built in, and I can't have recording devices at my office (where I use my iPod the most.)

There are options and things I like about other MP3 players, but most of them don't have the storage I want or come with a microphone for recording. The Zune is in the same boat because of its wireless "feature." I just want a MP3 player, leave the rest of the needless crap out of it!

Don't even get me started on the problems I have with camera phones.

Re:The Apple way

[vertinox]

Because you compared it and you actually found it REALLY superior to the other products in that market sector, or because someone told you it's cool and that you should have it?

It was a Christmas present and I didn't ask for it.

Yet, I found it quite superior than any other MP3 player I had owned previous by light years.

So its grown on me and I'll most likely get another Nano when the capacity reaches 16gb.

But yeah... I think it was bought for me because it was cool.

Although if it was a crappy gift, I'd doubt I would be considering another iPod in the future.

Re:The Apple way

[pen]

If you have an iPod, ask yourself why. Because you compared it and you actually found it REALLY superior to the other products in that market sector, or because someone told you it's cool and that you should have it? You needn't answer. Just ask yourself and try to be honest with yourself.

• Great user interface. Not perfect, but good. Responsive. Doesn't crash.
• No DRM if you know what you're doing.
• The densest solid-state player I could find. (8GB iPod nano.) The metal, virtually scratch-proof shell is nice, too.
• Great third-party support due to large market share. Write this off ass hipness if you want.
• Good support from Apple, from what I hear.

Re:The Apple way

[linuxpng]

My first iPod was 1st gen 5 gig (2001 I think?). Honestly, I liked how easy it was to update all my mp3 tags in iTunes to make them uniform so using the iPod was a natural selection.

I'll agree with you, these days I am almost embarassed to admit I have one because it's like bell bottoms or parachute pants. However, I happened to go look at other mp3 players. The creative option of the time looked like a cd player and was rather large. It stored an extra gig if I remember, but it was big and heavy. The other players that I remember at the time were all small flash based mp3 players and I was attracted to keeping my entire music in the car with me.

See, I don't listen to the radio and usually hear about new music from word of mouth. That being said the FM tuner in more recent models of players doesn't interest me. I only upgraded my ipod when the 4th gen 40 gigs came out because I needed more space, and recently to the 60 gig video because (well in this case I guess I am a whore) because of the smaller form factor. I admit I thought "cool I can watch movies and stuff now" but I've never done it since the first day. Aesthetically the color screen is an improvement.

I guess I'm not the guy you are targeting, I never considered what other people thought of my choice in a gadget. If you think about that for a second, it seems silly.

Re:The Apple way

[dasheiff]

I agree that Apple also goes for the 'cool' look.
But really what do you think of when you think of Apple?
Expensive and High Quality.
What do you think of when you think of Sony?
Expensive and Sues their Customers.
Guess which one is cooler?

Re:The Apple way

[yskel]

Obviously, Sony didn't fully disclose their identity as the source of this site. But I don't understand why this is more dishonest than what Apple does in their TV commercials. Is it worse to pay someone to build a fan site that takes advantage of people who can't tell ads from reality, or to put out TV commercials that both imply and explicitly state that Macs are better than PCs at running media, games and doing "fun things" - which takes advantage of people who don't know the difference between an OS and an application. Or to put out commercials that imply that Macs are impervious to virii/malware/etc (as opposed to windows/PC). Maybe Apple isn't quite so underhanded - at least you know that you are watching an Apple computer - but there ads seem to be at least a little misleading and dishonest. And if you agree with that, then pretty much everything being advertised looks like its being done so in a dishonest way.....

Re:The Apple way

[Sinbios]

> This simplicity is added to the fact that there is essentially no better MP3 jukebox on Windows, Linux or Mac, at least none that I have found. Songbird may approach it someday (but man, if you want to talk about memory footprints...), and MusikCube is alright but not as simple. WMP is, of course, a joke.

Foobar? Winamp? iTunes is one of the worst music players I've used.

Re:The Apple way

[Tingler]

It's funny, because I bought an iPod not for music, but for downloading pictures from my Nikon D70. Compact flash memory was rather expensive, & I wanted a way to move my photos off the cards so I could take more pictures. Unfortunately the Nikon D70 uses a USB 1.1 interface & the iPod battery would die while it waited for all the pics to download. I was going to return the iPod after discover that, but I had lost the receipt.

I didn't need an iPod because I can listen to music at work, & I have a Phatnoise in my car. Walking around actually gives me a break from music, so I didn't use it much. Soon after, I realized how nicely an iPod works with audio books from Audible.com. Plus you have the option to increase the speed that you listen to the books. The iPod does a wonderful job of speeding up the speech without making it hard to understand. So I like to listen to books on tape & on my iPod.

I also bought a Harmon Kardon Drive+Play. This neat little device allows me to plug my iPod into my car & listen to music or books on tape while I am driving. It will also keep the battery topped off.

I also have a couple of Slim Devices Squeezeboxes (Squeezeboxen?) The squeezebox software will import playlists from iTunes. So this means I only have to create a playlist once & I have it on my iPod, in my living room, in my bedroom, in my shower, & in my car.

  To me, all those things are pretty cool. Wouldn't you agree?

BTW- I never buy music from iTunes. eMusic all the way baby!

Re:The Apple way

[2nd Post!]

I think it's important to note the distinction; he said MP3 jukebox and you said music player.

A Discman is a music player; pop in a CD and hit play.
A 300 disc CD changer is a jukebox; pop in 300 CDs and navigate the albums, the genres, the playlists, the artists, etc, and then you hit play.

Are you saying Foobar or Winamp has better organizational, search, playlist, and access features than iTunes? Of course I stopped using Winamp a 2.95, so it may have picked up additional jukebox features, but at the time Winamp required I navigate my file system and drag and drop files to make a playlist.

iTunes, in comparison, allows me to make a list of rules:
Songs I've never played
Genre not country
Genre not children
Artist is not Celine
Less than 10 hours

And voila, I have a 10 hour long playlist of songs I've never played, that isn't country, not children's music, and not by artists with the name Celine.

Re:The Apple way

[Sosigenes]

Just wanted to pick on a point here which you raised which I'd be interested in learning more about. You comment 'WMP is, of course, a joke.' - "of course", why is that?

I use Windows Media Player 10 and have done for a long time for my music needs. I have Naspter (and subscribe) which integrates perfectly with WMP, I can listen to any music I want to at the click of a button, I can get music inforamtion on music I've both bought from Napster or ripped myself. Windows Media Player has my entire music library stored and handles it well and uses very little CPU or memory usage, I can leave it playing in the background most of the time quite happily. My two problems with it was that it didn't like tracker music files, but thanks to directplay that was easily solved, and that it was big, solved by finding a great skin named Tiny Player which is perfect. I have a pocket PC, a creative zen vision and a GP2X which I use for music/videos, and WMP handles both fine when it comes to automatically or manually handling. Therefore, I would like to challenge your comment that it is a joke - it's easy, it's simple and it works well and even those I know who have relatively little computer knowledge have been able to use it without problem. I find itunes a bit on the bloated side - I much prefer WMP with it's 10mb memory footprint maximised and 4mb footprint minimised - there's not really an excuse for bloaty applications, and this ZDNet article about utorrent in 130kbytes and its superb low memory footprint and resource friendly programming sums up my view quite well - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=153. Just because computers these days doesn't mean there is good justification for lazy programming and resource hogging which simply wasn't possible in the past.

I'd also like to add that my pocket PC, gp2x and creative zen vision all function great, I get great playback, battery life and features from all of them and have never had any problems.

Re:The Apple way

[prockcore]

Honestly, I liked how easy it was to update all my mp3 tags in iTunes to make them uniform so using the iPod was a natural selection.

That's funny, because I hated how updating all your mp3 tags in iTunes doesn't actually change them.. it just modifies the iTunes database. If you copy that mp3 somewhere else (like say, a portable player that isn't an ipod) your tags will revert to how they were before you imported them into iTunes.

Re:The Apple way

[UbuntuDupe]

You're supposed to disclose that you're a paid Apple rep, remember? ;-)

Re:The Apple way

[MojoStan]

Are you saying Foobar or Winamp has better organizational, search, playlist, and access features than iTunes?

In Foobar2000, these features are called "Media Library" and "Autoplaylist."

iTunes, in comparison, allows me to make a list of rules:
Songs I've never played
Genre not country
Genre not children
Artist is not Celine
Less than 10 hours

And voila, I have a 10 hour long playlist of songs I've never played, that isn't country, not children's music, and not by artists with the name Celine.

In Foobar2000:
%play_counter% EQUAL 0
NOT %genre% IS country
NOT %genre% IS children
NOT %artist% IS Celine

I don't know if there's a query string to generate a playlist less than 10 hours long. However, I can easily achieve the same thing by randomly sorting the playlist, selecting multiple items (click, hold, drag) until the total length field shows less than 10 hours, then cropping the playlist down to the selected items.

Re:The Apple way

[2nd Post!]

iTunes is still easier because I can set the playtime as a rule.

Re:The Apple way

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, WinAmp's dad can beat up iTunes's dad.

Re:The Apple way

[steveo777]

I've got both WMP 11 and iTunes 7.0. IIRC WMP11 was out after iTunes 7.0. So if Apple was borrowing from MS, I haven't a clue how. WMP seems to be a blatant copy of iTMS. I've never tried to sync or even interact with my iPod over any WMP interface, so I'll give it a shot the next time I update my music, but as the GP poster mentioned, it's already very simple with iTunes. I've got a 4Gb player and about 10Gigs of music. I've got artist that I listen to very often (about 2Gb) and then some that I switch on and off. I got the iPod because it was just better than any of the other players I had (Sandisk, Sanyo, Sony, Samsung). All of which had excruciatingly painful interfaces (Samsung being the worst, followed closely by Sony).

I'm not big on product loyalty. You never know when a product will turn to trash in its next iteration, so if, say this guy had a better interface and syncing software, I'd get it or whatever trumps the iPod next September on my iPod's expected dead-battery birthday (when I plan on replacing the battery and giving it to my sister).

Re:The Apple way

[Khuffie]

WMP11 will definitely not sync with the iPod, blame Apple for that one. :p Anyway, WMP11 was out and in beta state (pretty much feature complete aside from bugs and what not) for a long, long time, way before iTunes 7 came out.

Once again Sony is Satan...

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash nerds everybody does this. Sony, MS, Nintendo...and practically every other major brand has viral campaigns, shills on message boards and blogs...so this really isn't news.

What's even more amazing is if the current "IT" company of the moment Nintendo/Apple was "caught" doing this 90% of this page would say, "smart move, great marketing, Nintendo is my daddy...Steve Jobs is so smart for doing this..."

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[TomHandy]

That is, of course, ridiculous. If Apple or Nintendo were to do this, you would see plenty of people criticizing them for it, saying it was lame, etc. Seriously, there seems to be this notion that Apple or Nintendo never get criticized here, but that seems pretty far from reality.

The big difference of course though is that Apple and Nintendo currently don't NEED to do this. They didn't need to create fake blogs to get people to talk about current or upcoming products, because there are plenty of real ones that do this for them. Sony of course doesn't always need to do this either........ if you have a successful or in-demand product like the PS3, you don't need to create a website like alliwantforxmasisaps3.com.

Outside of that though, historically speaking, Apple and Nintendo haven't really had to do this, or even when you could say they had to do, it isn't the kind of thing they normally would do. I mean, remember, the Mac has minuscule marketshare, all things being equal. Nintendo's GameCube came in third place. But Apple and Nintendo haven't used that as an excuse to create some goofy fake site to try and add hipness or something to their product lines.

And really, Sony doesn't have to do that either. The other tact to take with the PSP is to keep releasing high quality titles like MGS: Portable Ops, and get REAL buzz going again for the platform from real people.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[cowscows]

I don't think the average ./ reader, or the average consumer would be too accepting of this sort of thing, regardless of who did it. Think for a second about what is going on here. An advertising firm is trying to pass off their ads as completely neutral, unsolicited praise for a product.

Everyone knows that advertisements stretch the truth a little, but we accept it because we know they're ads, we know they were created with a profit-driven agenda, and so we can compensate. We compensate by researching products, trying to find opinions and information from consumers; people who have bought, tried, used, and abused the product. There is a lot of demand for unfiltered assessments of products, because we all know that the company produced ads are bunk. What Sony is doing here is muddying that process.

Am I surprised that advertising has moved on to this? No, not really. I am surprised that a company as big as Sony feels the need to do it (and that they did it so poorly). But surprised or not, I definitely don't have to like it or approve of it. I, from time to time, worship at the altar of Apple. But if they were to do something like this, I would not be impressed, and I don't think /. would either.

Viral marketing isn't inherently bad. A good example was the 'i love bees' dealie that bungie did a while back. It was mysterious, and resulted in a lot of publicity, but it wasn't so blatantly dishonest. It was trying to create buzz, and not trying to pass off paid advertising as legitimate opinions. That was a genius marketing campaign.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[fistfullast33l]

Outside of that though, historically speaking, Apple and Nintendo haven't really had to do this, or even when you could say they had to do, it isn't the kind of thing they normally would do.

You assume too much. Apparently you forget the DataDyne marketing campaign by Nintendo for Perfect Dark which was dubbed the gayest campaign of all time by Nintendo's fans. Oh right, I forgot that Nintendo can do no wrong. And apparently you're implying that Sony relies on astroturfing for 100% of their marketing, which I don't think is correct.

I mean, remember, the Mac has minuscule marketshare, all things being equal. Nintendo's GameCube came in third place. But Apple and Nintendo haven't used that as an excuse to create some goofy fake site to try and add hipness or something to their product lines.

And you also would excuse Apple for dumping toxic waste and killing kitties because their marketshare makes them less important? I don't think so. Based on sales figures alone at the moment Sony has limited market share with the PSP, no? And the PS3 is in third place, right? So you're attacking them and excusing Apple and Nintendo even though their in the same situation.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[Winckle]

Argh, I am replying to you even though i've moderated in this discussion, because you talk such crap.

The datadyne sites were cool sites where you could read about a fictional company from a game. It gave people who were waiting for PD to come out a little something to explore, like a fictional world leaking into the real. They were not lying to their customers. They did not omit an official Nintendo/Rare logo from the advertisements. Sony are pretending to be 15 year olds in the real world to try and make people think that teenagers think the PSP is cool.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[dangitman]

So you're attacking them and excusing Apple and Nintendo even though their in the same situation.

But the grandparent post did not excuse Apple or Nintendo. He did not praise the DataDyne campaign (something I was not aware of, and probably the GP was also not) - and you have yet to show us where Apple has ever done any similarly deceptive advertising.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[fistfullast33l]

They were not lying to their customers. They did not omit an official Nintendo/Rare logo from the advertisements

I do not see one mention in those articles of Nintendo/Rare logos on the site at the time. Not to mention, the PSP logos are all over alliwantforxmasisapsp.com or whatever it is. In both cases, neither company comes out and says "We're company X" anywhere. Here's the link to the web archive. Show me where the website takes on the Nintendo Logo before March 2, 2000 (the date of the articles).

I agree with everyone that the attempt by Sony is lame. I don't agree with those that say that this is a criminal stunt by Sony and deserves punishment in some way.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[dangitman]

I don't agree with those that say that this is a criminal stunt by Sony and deserves punishment in some way.

Is anyone saying it was a criminal act? I see lots of people saying it was unethical, that it is sleazy, and that perhaps such behavior should be banned. I don't see anyone saying it actually is criminal.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[glesga_kiss]

Seriously, there seems to be this notion that Apple or Nintendo never get criticized here, but that seems pretty far from reality.

Oh, they do get negatively criticized* now and then, it just gets drowned in the groupthink and modded down into oblivion. Posting anti that might be critical of Apple always results in this. At best you can hope for a mod-war if enough people agree with you. I've had posts that have been moderated 15+ times on the subject.

(* the word criticism doesn't necessarily always mean bad review, to critique something is to review it and offer your viewpoint, good or bad.)

I've long since suspected that Apple have astroturfers on Slashdot. The views many Apple "fans" use are just too consistent. It's like you are fighting against a co-ordinated group of users that stick together and highlight posts for each other. The same phrases keep on coming through. Lets face it, if you wanted to astroturf for Apple, this is a great place to start.

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[Winckle]

Read the bottom of the page on may 11th 2000 "DATADYNE is a fictional company and is not affiliated with or related to any real business entity."

Re:Once again Sony is Satan...

[fistfullast33l]

The IGN article was written in March 2000. That would make the notice addition a little after the effect wore off, similar to what Sony just did to its page.

Viral

[Xymor]

It isn't fake, It IS a viral market campaign mixed with youtube fake phenomenoum(like lovelygirl15). It wouldn't be as effective if a company made a real ad and posted in youtube.
By getting all this exposure they must alredy have succeded in spiking PSP sales.

That and MGS Portable Ops(this game is awesome).

Re:Viral

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither lonelygirl NOR this are viral. They don't impel people to pass the message on. They create "buzz" by lying but they don't have compelling content to keep people involved. The Sony reps are trying, bless their hearts, but they don't seem to know how to spread their message. "Look at our content IF you want a PSP for christmas," is a lousy viral message. It attempts to create hype and sales by reaching out for the people that already want the product. They should be reaching out to people that never considered their product before.

Creating this fake cabal of "l33t" people who want a PSP only makes the consumer who isn't already interested in the product feel like an outsider. A real viral campaign invites people in, and gives them a reason to make themselves at home.

you must be working for sony...

[Programmer_In_Traini]

...to be saying this.

The difference between a beer ad with 20 naked women and the youtube thing is that the beer ad doesnt try to make you think its real.

What sony is doing is not called marketing, its called deception.

Zonk Behind Fake Anti-Sony Slashdot Campaign

[Anonymous Coward]

prove me wrong

Re:Zonk Behind Fake Anti-Sony Slashdot Campaign

[Fizzl]

I can't see anything to refute here...

I am Batman and you are a green llama in a drag. Prove me wrong!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's notable because it's so BAD!!

[Vesuvias]

There is nothing wrong with marketing but I think a lot of people have problems with paid corporate influence of things like user reviews. Perfectly legal for them to do but it is kind of slimy from the customers prospective (since they expect non biased reviews from 3rd parties). Paying someone to "pose" as an unbiased 3rd party to peddle your product will definatly seem dishonest to the customer.

That said, what is disturbing about this particular marketing site is how BAD it is. The horrible rap video and fake user comments with 'l337' speak does not help them with thier target audience. Some might say that there is no such thing as bad press. Well that is definatly not true. It is especially not true when you are pushing 'hip' and "trendiness' of your product. That's a dangerous road, one mistep or one improper association and you undue all of your positive marketing work. In this case I can easily see someone pulling out a PSP to play and thier friends imediatly start ragging them by mockingly rapping to "all I want for christmas is a PSP" video. Does Sony really want to associate themselves with beyond horrible rap songs and piss poor attempts at l337 speak???

Ves

Re:It's notable because it's so BAD!!

[IgLou]

Actually the real problem is deeper. Viral marketing is at it's least lame but at it's worst it's a form of social engineering. You might not even be aware that you're being targetted. These firms plant people on message boards, the internet, or even just walking down the street acting "normal" but really they are pushing a brand on you. Advertising and marketing should be clearly identified for what they are; simply put it needs to be regulated. Without proper regulation this is turning into a matter of shaping public opinion through sheer fabrication and this one example is highlight of such.

Think about how many youths started to form an opinion about the psp based upon this website. Forget a hands on experience with the product. Now I, Joe Consumer, want this because someone else does and look at the lengths they go through to get one.

I'm not trying to jump up and down on the poster but saying how crappy the site looks is glossing over that there is a problem with viral marketing and you can do something about it by asking your politicians to regulate if not ban viral marketing. I imagine I'll get flamed for saying such a thing but everyone deserves to know if what they are experiencing is in fact intended to make them by a product. Oh and yes, I know it's broad to say such a thing and what about toys based upon movies and such... but something has to be done at some point.

Marketing? Yeah Right!

[flitty]

Sony officially sucks at marketing (or their choice in the people who do it for them). Honestly, look at the site, over 2000 comments about how much gamers hate this kind of garbage. This won't spike sales of PSP's, it will do the opposite. People don't want to hear "LOLZ11!!1one for R34lz!". I for one, HATE astroturf. As far as advertising goes, this will work as well as a flightsuit and a "mission accomplished" banner behind you.

Blame the advertising company.

[MaWeiTao]

This to me just demonstrates the quality of the advertising and marketing industry. They produce this sort of garbage more for their own reputation and portfolio than they do for the good of the client.

They want to demonstrate that they're capable of doing extreme, creative work but the end result is lame and far from being creative. It's like they produce the first crappy idea someone comes up with. And it seems they're obsessed with Adult Swim and Youtube.

I'm curious is Sony openly embraced these campaigns or if they were forced into it by the marketing company. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter. From personal experience, I've found the people at many of these advertising companies to be very arrogant. I also get the distinct impression from their surveys that they seem to have a habit of fabricating market research which somehow always demonstrates that their way of doing things is the most effective.

I realize everyone seems to enjoy bashing Sony and I can't say I disagree with much of what is said. That said, I can't say this is unique to Sony. I'd say most consumer goods companies use this sort of advertising. To single out Sony for this over anyone else is a bit foolish to me. What I do hate is this sort of advertising, to me it's an insult to my intelligence. But then, I hate advertising in general.

Re:Blame the advertising company.

[drinkypoo]

I'm curious is Sony openly embraced these campaigns or if they were forced into it by the marketing company. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter.

Uh, Sony is an 800lb gorilla. The Ad Agency doesn't tell Sony what to do. It's the other way around.

Sony has immense industry cred because they are successful.

I thought this was about the G4 spoof

[random coward]

I thougt this was about this video about the Wii and PS3 And I thought: why would sony expect this to be positive marketing. Then I realized it was about something else. But I guess its all viral marketing, just some is better than others.

Did Sony release the symbols to public domain?

[ReallyEvilCanine]

In the "blog" Sony paid for (and condoned) is the following:

don't just wear it - pwn it!!1!

<pictures snipped>

step 1: download the iron-on patterns sheet
step 2: print
step 3: cut out pieces you want on your t
step 3: iron on
step 4: wear it like u mean it

No terms. No requirements. No restrictions. No demands. No disclaimers. Anyone who understands "pwn it!!1!" can easily claim that Sony paid a company to expressly promote and authorise the free use of any and all trademarked symbols, none of which display a trademark symbol in the PDFs, for their own purposes regardless of what they might be. That is pwnage.

One more Thing

[flitty]

I think sony has effectively killed '1337' speak. Thank dog for that. Maybe we can stop using it (even in jest).

sony has too much money to deceive you

[teh_chrizzle]

What sony is doing is not called marketing, its called deception.

i think you have your terms confused.

when a prominent media figure uses lawyers and journalists to avoid telling the truth, that's called spin .

when a government official enlists the help of others to not tell the truth, that's called a national security .

when a huge multi-national corporation doesn't tell the truth, that's called marketing .

when a regular person, doesn't tell the truth and has no money, politcal affiliation or legal representation that's lying .

lying is bad. spinning, marketing, and national security are what keeps us safe at night.

Re:sony has too much money to deceive you

[Programmer_In_Traini]

>>when a huge multi-national corporation doesn't tell the truth, that's called marketing .

i see where you are going but i need to remind you that deception is as much a category of lies as it is a category of marketing.

deception is an adjective of marketing as in "Sony has used deceptive marketing techniques for its PSP"

in the same way, you could say "Joe has deceived his girlfriend by telling her he did not have an affair with his Linux box". See ? it doesn't matter just how bad or wacko joe is, he lied in a deceptive manner so that his girlfriend would believe what she found on the screen is in fact banana pudding.

Syntaxatically yours,
Mr. Period.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/11/03

Re:sony has too much money to deceive you

[bornbitter]

...Amen. Thank you.
I think you left one out though...

Calls for regulation on 'spin', 'National Security', 'lying', 'marketing', and all other forms of 'speech' (other than when under oath - before a judicial body) - is called CENSORSHIP. ...none of this means you have to believe anything said, marketed, broadcast, printed, etc... Whether you believe any of this is your choice.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. The ads will disappear if no one buys it.

Re:sony has too much money to deceive you

[teh_chrizzle]

i need to remind you that deception is as much a category of lies as it is a category of marketing.

that, sir, is preposterous! corporations don't lie! they have money! i do not think that you understand the gravitational pull of large amounts of money.

all money emits a small amount of positive energy. obviously, the larger the sum of money available to you, the greater the positive charge that is applied to your actions.

in your example, "Joe has deceived his girlfriend by telling her he did not have an affair with his Linux box" you are not taking in to account joe's wealth or social status. if joe is a poor student from a lower-middle class family then he is clearly pathetic and possibly in need of professional help. he, like many impoverished individuals, would be considered by many mental health professionals "crazy". if on the otherhand, joe is a famous millionaire his behavior would be considered harmless and we would call him "eccentric". his machine and behavior might be featured in a segment on "MTV Cribs".

take for example a young girl that indulges herself irresponsibly. if her parents are poor she is a "whore" and a "drug addict". if her parents are rich she is known as a "socialite". a middle class manager of a walmart who attempts to buy women's affections is a "sleaze" and a "perv". a billionaire real estate tycoon who attempts to buy women's affections is a "playboy". [see also: "creepy old man" v. "hugh hefner"] the same holds true for corporations. if a small local company uses half truths or falsehoods to sell you a product, that is known as "running a scam". a large multinational corporation using falsehoods and half truths to move products is "running a promotional campaign".

on the surface, all of these actions seem very similar. however, if you look closely (at the money) you will see that they are really quite different. "whores", "drug addicts", "sleazes" and "pervs" are all despicable things that should be pitied and/or punished. "socialites" and "playboys" are good and things that we should admire and perhaps aspire to one day be. poor people and businesses have to be held accountable for their actions and poor ethical and moral choices. wealthy companies and individuals have already demonstrated their worth (in terms of dollars) and are clearly beyond reproach.

Re:sony has too much money to deceive you

[Programmer_In_Traini]

lol, you know what ? i thought i had it nailed down pretty good in my previous post, but i think i like your post better haha.

Critique

[MeanderingMind]

You don't need to have spent years on the internet to know that when someone makes common mistakes/shortcuts like luv and ur, they don't do it halfway. You'll never see the following sentence on the internet by someone doing it unintentionally.

Hello everyone, I was just thinking that ur all going to luv my latest blog entry.

This sentence of my creation highlights something everyone who's ever used IRC, read Barrens chat, or hacked the e-mail of a 14 year old knows. People who use ur and luv and similar shortcuts and mispellings will not be using proper punctuation, spelling and grammar. It doesn't happen.

Yet, here is what we have from the website. I will be pointlessly dissecting it.

here's the deal::: i (charlie) have a psp. my friend jeremy does not. but he wants one this year for xmas.

People do not use colons on the internet. That key is the jaded and lost son of the realm of QWERTY. People also make assumptions, assumptions such as their identity being well known. They won't be specifying that they are "charlie", you should already know that. If you don't, you're a noob. Jeremy fails to be derided for not having a PSP. Lastly, no one speaking like this would specify "this year", or type "one" out. Number keys are there 4 a reason.

so we started clowning with sum not-so-subtle hints to j's parents that a psp would be teh perfect gift. we created this site to spread the luv to those like j who want a psp!

No one on the internet can spell subtle, let alone know where to use hyphens. A common thing to notice is the use of larger words here were smaller ones would have sufficed. "started" could be "were" or "did". "created" is two syllabels longer than "made". The last sentence would more improperly be "we maed this site 2 giv luv 4 u who want a psp liek j!"

consider us your own personal psp hype machine, here to help you wage a holiday assault on ur parents, girl, granny, boss -- whoever -- so they know what you really want.

Again with the long words. Very few words over 2 syllabels are in the common lexicon on the internet. "consider", "personal", "holiday", "whoever", all unknown to the internet mind. Again with the hyphens as well. There are no "girl"s on the internet, only "gf"s, and when was the last time we saw "granny"? What kid this supposed age would have a "boss"?

we'll let you know how it works for us. pls return the favor.

more to come,
c&j.

Anyone who uses ur is not going to type out "you". "you" is four characters too many as it is. Also, the kind of comraderie shown in this last sentiment is completely foreign. This is the internet, not a high tea. There are no favors, there are only noobs and 1337 h4x.

if ur goin 2 b 1337 u hav 2 b cool like m3 lol

Re:Critique

[Spaceman40]

After reading your critique, I'm not sure what's more annoying: the actual 14 y/o or the fake 14 y/o.

Re:Critique

[hmccabe]

People do not use colons on the internet.

In a grammatical sense, yes. However, I guess it depends on what definitions you have for "use" and "colon." Filters prevent me from providing an example.

H.

Re:Critique

[Anonymous Coward]

syllabels, eh?

Re:Critique

[Anonymous Coward]

You made the same typo the GP did!

Re:Critique

[ginbot462]

I am going to start using colons now like craz:::::zy like$?!

Re:Critique

[FriendOfBagu]

People do not use colons on the internet. That key is the jaded and lost son of the realm of QWERTY.

Too bad. :(

Re:Critique

[MeanderingMind]

I stand by my previous, wildly inaccurate statement! That is not a colon, clearly those are eyes!

Re:Critique

[AbRASiON]

I dunno dude, I've seen a colon used at some goatse place if I recall - it was quite terrifying.

aahhh, but you forget

[Ender Ryan]

Ah, but you forget, it is now "cool" to hate Sony and talk about how much you hate them at every chance you get. Logic, consistency, and fairness are out the window.

Re:aahhh, but you forget

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Ah, but you forget, it is now "cool" to hate Sony and talk about how much you hate them at every chance you get."

It wouldn't be cool to hate them if their products were more worthwhile.

Re:aahhh, but you forget

[thatguywhoiam]

Ah, but you forget, it is now "cool" to hate Sony and talk about how much you hate them at every chance you get.

Sadly, you are right. And I did forget. I wonder what the half-life for that phenomenon is. (Probably the length of time between the rootkit and the first breakout hit for the PS3. Or Spiderman 3, whichever comes first.)

Happens all the time...

[RexRhino]

In fact, I am pretty sure more than a few "reviews" on Slashdot are just paid advertising.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Sony Parodying Itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

The more I see of Sony's desperately poor marketing of the PSP and PS3 the more I wonder if their seemingly perfect marketing for the original Playstation was a giant massive fluke.

In Europe Sony marketed the Playstation to the clubbers, the 18-28 year old, out every weekend on a bender but think they're trendy demographic, and they marketed it hard. But they didn't do it by making the playstation appear trendy they just did it by advertising it plainly were-ever that demographic might be. It was simple if was effective, it worked. It usurped Nintendo and replaced it with Playstation for the generic word for playing on a console. I took my hat of to them.

Now though, maybe Sony don't realise what they achieved or how they did it. Maybe they just succeeded by having the best console of that generation by a country mile combined with advertising at the correct market. Maybe they grown complacent and arrogant about their market.

It seems to me that Nintnendo have truly learnt the lessons of Sony's PSOne advertising and learnt from their own mistakes (the disaster of the N64 "You can't buy this yet" ad, whoever came up with that should have been shot). They have been saturating the new-media professional demographic with a passion, the middle class parents with a 6 year child name Beartrix or Sky or Julian. Sponsoring all of Channel 4 original comedy output is a masterstroke. Giving everyone who attended the videogame BAFTAs last year a DS was a knockout punch to the PSP's mindshare before the fight had even started.

Honest answer

[2nd Post!]

I got my iPod in 2001. Yes, it was really superior to everything out there at the time. It held more than a 128mb Rio flash player and was tiny in comparison to the Nomad Jukebox. It was more expensive and didn't have as much storage, but on the other hand file transfer was 10x faster, UI navigation was faster, and battery life was better.

It's not my fault that Creative couldn't come out with a competitor (The Zen) until 2004, three years later.

The hype and the cool and the hip came years later. Without a core of simplicity and functionality the iPod hype would have fizzled away... much like the PSP will soon too :)

Bad faith for youtube

[shoptroll]

This is the sort of stuff that I have issues with on community oriented sites now that businesses have infiltrated them. YouTube should threaten to take this crap down since Sony is essentially offloading the filehosting capabilities onto YouTube for this stuff. I feel the same way when I see a movie or album advert on tv now with a URL directing to its MySpace page. These are supposed to be sites to build communities around, not a freaking marketing section of the web.

Sony posting fake reviews... again!

[SnowDog74]

Quick, look and see if there are any comments posted by EarlDittman!

When you report on a viral marketing scheme...

[mypalmike]

... you become part of that viral marketing scheme. Good work, Slashdot editors.

Re:When you report on a viral marketing scheme...

[mhazen]

Flushing a toilet does not make one a turd.

Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Sony, right ...

Thomas Hesse of Sony:

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

Sony can kiss my a**. I've no time for their silly and dishonest games.

The problem isn't just that it's aweful...

[DietCoke]

I don't know whether it makes me want to physically harm myself. However, for a moment I did ponder the possibility of beating the living shit out of a PR person.

It's called Pathetic

[SloWave]

After looking at the site I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Do middle school kids really talk and act like that today or is this just some marketing dweebs wet dream. No other middle school generation could've ever been this dorky as what I saw on Sony's web site.

Wait?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's news to someone that this was viral? There is actually a rube out there that DIDN'T recognize this as viral marketing IMMEDIATELY?! Wow...ok...

Snakes on a plane

[abshnasko]

Other things have been advertised via viral marketing... just 'cause its Sony it gets headlines? You say theyre 'up to their old tricks again'... well congratulations, you're the reason this type of marketing is successful.

Re:Snakes on a plane

[dangitman]

The "Snakes on a Plane" buzz/meme was started by an actual blog that was making fun of the name. It was unexpected by the producers, who actually wanted to change the name. It was basically Sam Jackson's hilarious remarks and a bunch of actual internet nerds who created the viral campaign - not the company. They did later take advantage of this, but through more traditional means, like Jackson't interview on The Daily Show.

Re:It's called Marketing, and it made people angry

[mmell]

Not so much because of the perceived dishonesty (after all, anybody who believes that advertisers always tell the absolute truth deserve what they get, which is hopefully eliminated from the gene pool), but because of the insult. I've been lied to plenty of times, please don't insult my intelligence.

Put it another way: you want to play dumb, that's fine - just don't act like I am.

viral marketing

[SimDarth]

This happens all the time these days. People are paid to put fake youtube.com videos and post ads in public forums all the time.
Anyway, anyone ever had Bachelor Chow (c)? Great stuff!

Viral marketing and comments

[Jugalator]

Is this new method really worth the bad PR that follows once it's uncovered?
Hmm, but I guess that's the market analysts job to confirm before putting such plans into action...

I don't like it though; videos are alright if they wish to hide who made them, but posting such comments feels like crossing a line to me.

all part of the plan

[themoebius]

You realize that slashdot has now become part of their viral marketing engine? This is all going exactly as planned. Now they just need an article in the NYT ranting about how sony put up fake advertising, which would of course provide links to that very advertising as slashdot has done. Bingo bango, here's an extra 50,000 PSPs sold.

World of Lies

[Mdentari]

People defending this must not care about truth anymore. It's a sad sad day when our world think that lieing is acceptable and that it's a normal part of every day life. Thank god none of these people are my friends (who think integrity is a positive human trait) but I think they are more the exception to the rule. Everywhere I go in media and politics and religion lies are pervasive. What are these people teaching future generations. I think these people don't think society has moral responsibilty to individuals but only to self gain at the cost of truth. I for one will fight that kind of thinking at any cost.

Darn, how much is Microsoft & Nintendo paying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by the comments I see on places like here, and the gaming news stories that get posted here, I do have to wonder about that.....

A metaphor for my generation

[Hrothgar The Great]

I sort of tend to agree with you; in fact, in most other situations I would completely agree about "viral marketing", but in this case Sony's attempt to talk IM-speak with the kids is the 2006 equivalent of your fat white old teacher trying to rap at you in 1992 because that's what all these crazy kids are doing these days. Except if Sony was your teacher, they'd have a big fucking clock around their neck like Flava Flav and gold rings on every finger, all trying to flash gang signs with their arms crossed over their chest and every other word out of their mouth would be "phat".

And jesus, Sony, you look dumb as hell with your hat on sideways. It's EMBARRASSING.

'member when...

[daemon_mf]

M'soft did the same thing a few years ago.. was kinda lauded as brilliant marketing IIRC... Demonizing a company for doing bad things is one thing, but making something harmless seem bad just because you don't particularly care for that company's habits isn't any better.

Said the man with the $3700 suit. C'mon!

Non-issue

[gamer4Life]

It amazes me how this can go on the front page of Slashdot. It's no different from Microsoft paying bloggers and editors to post negative stories about their competitors or positive stories about their own products. "Paying" can be in the form of different incentives, such as advertising dollars, pre-written articles, special information, or just plain cash.

To link to another non-issue regarding the "graffiti" just shows how biased this story is.

Let's talk about more Microsoft innovation, shall we?

Marketing 101

[daemon_mf]

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

The only crime committed...

[Yaotzin]

...is that awful rap! Bleurch!

Mmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the missiles. Need to send at least 5 missiles their way :-)

Maybe more, in the case of Sony marketroids... I dunno. Super missiles wouldn't hurt, either. Or maybe just a super bomb and clear the whole screen of baddies.

Damn, now where did I put my varia and high jump boots? They're probably hiding deep under Brinstar...

We're not stupid

[ZDRuX]

Is it really necessary to bash this? I mean.. is anybody here going to run out and buy a PSP right this minute because of this deceptive marketing campaign?

Obviously not because we don't need some half-ass blog to tell us that a PSP is cool or uncool, we can make that judgement ourselves. Like someone else here said, the only people who will actually pay ANY attention to this are the people who are already looking to buy a PSP for x-mas and want to share their desire for the PSP with others. Anybody else will spend about 10sec. on the site and move on to something else.

Anybody ignorant enough to suddenly have the urge to buy a PSP after looking at that blog should probably go ahead and throw away their money on it, since I doubt they'd think of anything better to spend it on.

oh noes my dns is teh pwnd!

[Chaxid]

http://zi.zipatoni.com/PspXmas/blog/ umm . . . well there goes plausible deniability

Where are my mod points...

[scwizard]

Damn, I had points yesterday.
This should be a +3ish troll, not a 0 troll.

Someone should probably throw a point of insightful in there for good measure.

The URL...

[ex_ottoyuhr]

Did anyone else read that as something like "Allivant Formaxis Isapsis"? Am I the only one whose Greek is sufficiently mediocre to not always read an English "X" as a Greek letter "Chi"? :P

(In other words, yes, stupid, but remember the "white and black" PSP ads, or the mock-graffiti? Being surprised as Sony doing something underhanded to market the PSP is like being surprised that the bright yellow thing came up again this morning...)

Zipatoni?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zipatoni? No wonder I've been seeing spots.

Zip-a-tone: tone screens used for shading artwork, perhaps most commonly used to do the tone screens in b/w manga.

*yawn*

Zamboni would be a better name but they'd probably get sued.

It's not marketing, it's lying.

[LKM]

This is no different from any other commercial on any other form of media.

Except that it's not declared as advertisement. If you have an ad in a paper, it has a little "ad" bar above it to make sure people know it's not editorial content. Ads in TV are clearly identified as such. Even product placement is identified as such.

This here? That's not an ad, that's just a lie.

So, how much did Sony pay you to post your comment? Why should I trust your comment, knowing that Sony will do crap like this?

Whether it was poorly done doesn't matter

[LKM]

Yup, these guys were so good that no one realized that their fake weblog was a paid advertisement.

That doesn't matter. If Sony is doing this, how do I know your very comment wasn't paid by Sony? I don't suppose everything they do is that stupid, and I want to know whether I'm looking at a comment (or a blog, or a web site) from an actual person, or at an ad from Sony disguised as one of these things.

My God!! The Hate!!

[Pablo El Vagabundo]

I feel a disturbance in the force heading straight for Bony!!

One thing is to play with unrealistic expectations

[jotaeleemeese]

... and another very different is being deceitful and trying to cover your tracks.

In one situation we should be able to discern how the marketing is working and make informed decisions based on that.

In the other situation we are being manipulated and lied to.

If you can't see the difference you must work in marketing.

Because it is easy to use.

[jotaeleemeese]

Somebody gave it to me as a present. So there genius.

I have not bought a single track from iTunes for example. You can't make DRM trendy and cool, no matter how you present it.

That's how it's done in the UK

[glesga_kiss]

When information is presented, it should be cited when there are profit-based slants involved. I don't want to say there should be a law about it, but in some cases, there are already laws about it.

At least on TV here in the UK, adverts must state that they are adverts. Even the infomercials on late at night have "commercial presentation". Any ad that is designed to pretend to be a show ends up looking stupid.

Of course, there is a line to be drawn here. Personally, I think it should be further away from the consumers. I'd like to see e.g. review shows state that the manufacturer provided the item and so on. The best review publications are those that buy the items themselves and can say what they like. If they aren't free to say "this sucks"*, then the review is pointless.

* funny story; the BBC car show Top Gear reviewed a particular car and gave it a terrible review. The story goes that the editor received a letter stating that the car manufacturer will be ceasing advertising on the - commercial-free - network. Missed the point methinks.

Two can play at that game...

[Ben174]

If Sony can do it, we can too :) http://www.alliwantforxmasisaps3.com/

Greg Meyerkord, the Registrant, aka 'Chris'

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the website is registered to Greg Meyerkord (this was also mentioned several times in the comments of each 'blog' post). Here is his website: http://www.meyerkord.com./ And a few pictures of him as well:

http://www.lowcyclehum.com/images/rustymeyerkord.j pg
http://www.meyerkord.com/meyerkord.com/About%20Me. html

Lessoned learned - don't use your real name...