Finally the long awaited Sony Foam ad. Miami is transformed into a giant bubblebath, filling whole streets with foam.
Its an epic of an ad and I love the idea of inviting real people to frolic and film their own stories within the ad. Director Simon Ratigan of HLA enlisted the services of 200 temporary employees in the form of locals, armed with the latest products to shoot their own footage. The idea was that all participants would then upload their film and pictures onto an online database, however, anticipating the leakage of this content, they actively encouraged sharing across the digital space – the ad has had 40,000 hits on YouTube in just over a week.
Its fun, watchable but most importantly, its a demonstration of the quality of the products in mass media (Handycam, Cyber-shot and new ‘a’ range of digital cameras). The world has moved on, advertising can’t just sell, it needs to demonstrate even within mass media.
What I love about Sony is that they are doing everything that ad agencies advocate: build a brand, create a Lovemark, take your brand on a journey. Make people find your product irrestible. In the tech sector, very few companies with the exception of Apple, are doing this. Most tech companies tend to be very tactical in their approach and focus on the specific features of the product when most people have no clue or interest in the finer details of what they are buying. For example, 70% of people think that once they have bought their HD TV that all the programmes they watch will be in high definition.
Sony not only have improved their advetising in last few years but they have changed the way the way they do business and made their stores a much more inviting place for women Not only that, they are redesigning their retail outlets in Switzerland to include couches and offer child care services (that would be heaven for me and most mums) and their staff are being trained to ask about interior design tastes and wishes.
My only begrudging critique is that it feels that the strategy has been streched somewhat to fit this ad. I think the reason Colour Like no Other is so successful is that is such a simple link to the product and everyone (including my mum which is always a test of simplicity) gets the message. SImple, clear and elegant. This ad has a much more tenuous link to the Sony products on offer – images like no other feels one floor down from the original thought. Very powerful ad nonetheless.
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