Playstation's video blogging campaign

Julian Smith | May 26, 2005, 06:37 AM

My respect goes out to Sony Playstation this week, and their UK digital agency Greenroom Digital , for the creation of what looks like a highly innovative and well integrated summer marketing campaign.(My respect also goes out to the Liverpool football team - who made such an incredible comeback, after looking dead and buried, to win the Champions league last night!! And I'm an Arsenal fan!)

Playstation's new 'Summer of Freedom' campaign seems to embrace so many of the new opportunities that are opening up to marketers as consumers become increasingly empowered by digital technology. The campaign centres around a competition to find four "freedom explorers" who will be given a summer of free experiences, including going to music festivals and being taught to skateboard by professionals, and then asked to record their experiences in regular video diaries (or 'video blogs') which will be posted on the central campaign website . The public will then be asked to vote online for their favourite 'personality' to win the, as yet undisclosed, top prize. The site will also include a community section where users can create their own web space and upload video blogs, with console and game prizes available for the best blog each week.

I think this activity sounds really compelling for a number of reasons:

- It is well targeted to the Playstation audience (predominantly young males, I imagine) offering highly motivating rewards
- It is well integrated online and offline and also in conjunction with live events
- It capitalizes on broadband Internet access - with the use of video content central to the campaign
- It creates an immersive brand experience
- Most of all, by allowing self-expression, capitalizing on the growth of user generated content and blogging, and voting it enables consumers to participate and interact not only with the brand but also with each, which encoruages consumer congregation, and builds a community, around the brand. And it does all this without every actually showing a picture of the product!!

As the online product manager for Sony Playstation UK says "The idea is to let people be creative and do whatever they want, rather than being a hard sell from Playstation".

And this is it, marketers who act as facilitators, enabling consumer control and participation, in tune with their target audience, rather than preachers giving them the hard sell are likely to win out in the digital future. Just think of the positive buzz this is likely to create amongst gamers and the peer-to-peer endorsement that Playstation will generate from this.

I will look forward to hearing how well the campaign takes off over the coming months.