After Sony’s viral marketing attempt was publicly revealed as a fraud, Sony has come clean.
Following its launch in November, PSP fan blog All I Want for Xmas is a PSP was quickly derided by gaming media as a Sony shill for their handheld system. A flood of disgusted comments from angry visitors were briefly denied by the characters, and any mention of “Zipatoni” or “marketing” were automatically removed.
Yesterday, the site was updated with a post from Sony admitting the blog and characters were manufactured by the marketing firm. Although it featured PSP-obsessed teenagers making videos about the system, gamers discovered that marketing company Zipatoni had registered the domain name and that the actors in the videos were employees of the firm.
“Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn’t a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever,” said an update on the site. “From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.”
Independent band AVEX was hired to create the music and videos, and still features one PSP video on their website.
Published: Dec 14, 2006 02:40 pm