Sony ‘Graffiti’ Calls Transparency into Question

Sony’s new ad campaign for the PlayStation Portable has some Philadelphians upset, calling the ads “illegal and arrogant,” rather than hip, as the company no doubt intended, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The ads are painted directly onto building walls, look like graffiti, and make no mention of Sony.

The ads are illegal, according to the article, because Philadelphia has billboard regulations requiring that companies must get a permit from the city’s Licenses and Inspections Department before putting up ads, which Sony did not do.

Jake Dobkin, copublisher of the Gothamist blog, dislikes the ads because he feels the campaign is trying to dupe him. His posting, titled Corporate Graffiti Sucks Balls, got picked up by several other blogs and eventually by Wired News. That article pointed out that although the ads were being attacked in many of the cities in which they were painted - with detractors adding commentary of their own in some cases, such as the word “Fony” and the phrase “Get out of my city” - others liked the campaign.

“It’s a cheeky wink toward a savvy audience who are already familiar with the product,” Piers Fawkes, who writes the IF blog, is quoted as saying. “It’s reflective of modern approach to marketing. The creative classes are sick of marketing when done badly or blandly, but when it’s done in (an) intelligent manner, we appreciate it.”

The Sony ads, which show vacant-eyed children using their Sony PSPs in a variety of unusual ways - licking one like a popsicle, dangling one like a marrionette puppet - are certainly not the first to use graffiti to tout a product. But they do give rise to the question of “transparency” or full disclosure, since the ads make no mention of Sony. A hot topic in word-of-mouth marketing, transparency suggests that connections between an endorser of a product and the product itself be disclosed.

“Marketers should have more common sense than this,” says Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, whose Code of Ethics calls for honesty of identity. “It’s using vandalism to do fake grassroots marketing. Doing fake graffiti is as bad as using a fake identity in a chat room.”