Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

Well it’s been less than a week since marketing firm Zipatoni were outted as being the “brains” behind the Sony Xmas viral site for their PSP.  Zipatoni did respond briefly as mentioned in my previous post, but it was as bollocks as the whole marketing campaign itself.

The site has since been taken down – I originally thought it might be a server crash due to the traffic being sent from the blogsphere and social media sites such as Digg, etc, but it seems that the site is down permanently.

I did manage to find this article though that claims to have had a brief statement from both Sony and Zipatoni on the matter:

Next-Gen contacted SCEA PR boss David Karraker who answered a couple quick questions. When asked about the magnitude of this PR mishap, he replied, “Buzz and viral marketing is a common practice across the industry.  In this instance, SCEA hired an outside agency to create a humorous ‘underground’ PSP site for the holidays.  The tongue-in-cheek nature of the site didn’t come across as intended and we have since altered it.”

Sooo…we got it wrong.  Zipatoni didn’t create an insanely bad viral site – it was just meant to be tongue-in-cheek and we all just missed the point.

Next Gen go on…

When confronted about accusations that Sony underestimated gamers’ intelligence with the campaign, he stated, “Sony just released the most advanced console ever developed, so I doubt seriously that anyone would think we are underestimating our consumers’ intelligence.  This was simply a marketing idea that was poorly executed.”

Lol Sony – way to make a bad situation worse.  I think they may be overestimating their consumers’ loyatly if they seriously think that the power of their brand is going to blind people to crap like this and a very late market entry for the PS3.

Next Gen contacted Zipatoni about the flog and subsequent backlash, but they said they weren’t prepared to comment [at this time].  Probably a good idea!

MG