Oh, those rascals at the Sony Marketing Department! Last week they were forced to admit that http://www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com was not a spontaneous grassroots effort by kids to convince people to buy them a PSP; in fact it was a dumb, poorly-disguised corporate website flogging the game console. It brought to mind another borderline-illegal stunt, also from the fine folks at Sony.

Around the year 2000 Columbia Pictures started incorporating quotes from a reviewer named David Manning. Manning wrote for the Ridgefield Press and was one of those critics who seem to like everything. He thought HOLLOW MAN was “one hell of a scary ride!” He praised Heath Ledger as “this year’s hottest new star!” All told Manning quotes appeared in the campaigns for about 5 films before a writer for Newsweek called the Ridgefield Press to talk to Manning and was told that no such person worked there. In fact, it turned out there was no such person anywhere. A class-action suit followed.

Sony needs to stop this! Not because it’s wrong, not because it’s immoral. They need to stop because they are so bad at it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Computer Games, General, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.