Ad Watch: Sony brings Walkman brand up to date
Share
Tom Eslinger, worldwide creative director of interactive, Saatchi & Saatchi
Ramping up for the Christmas season, I find myself on the receiving end for all sorts of promotions as the annual spending/buying cycle kicks into gear. That’s why I’ve chosen the Sony Walkman campaign as my Campaign of the Month. I’m deeply engaged with new ideas and products, so I dig its cool ways of creating and finding music and cool gadgets that help me get more music.
The campaign is at an early stage, but the simplicity of the site is refreshing. It’s a good tease and an intriguing lure to participate. I appreciate that the materials on the site are simple to listen to, download and use. The spare and clean design flows into the user engagement - so rare and so welcome. Too many ‘audience participation’ online or mobile events put most of the work back on the viewer. They make it even harder with complex instructions and obscure access to the stuff you need to make your submission. So I appreciate that Sony Walkman Project didn’t wasted my time. I even set up my bass and drum set this weekend to have a jam.
Promoting TV programmes can be difficult — short lead times, difficulty getting content and a fairly linear path to travel, working with set content and schedules. The work around Lost for Words is really good and points clearly to an understanding of the audience (children) and a simple way to get into the main idea and content (creating a personalised story). I’d liked to have seen more interaction within the story and ad units. The personalised story and tease for the programme engaged me and I wanted to experience more. That probably means I’m greedy and the creatives are clever for giving me just enough to pull me (or any similarly minded 12-year-old) in.
Jingles for Pringles is a fun idea that grabbed me because I enjoy singing carols. There’s no doubt that this campaign will drag out the Kristmas Karaoke crowd, hopefully not too close to my home. I like the idea, but this is a Christmas promotion and should immediately feel fun. I think a reduced amount of copy and more focus on the movies and how to make and submit them for the competition would help. The gallery of clips is easy to access and I’ll certainly come back to check out more, and send the best/worst to my friends.
Argos’s Giant Jar is another nice idea, which could have played out much better online. I immediately wanted to shake and play with the jar of goodies, but became frustrated quickly. There’s lots of time spent upfront with instructions, which could have been built into the interface. It’s hard to get into the jar and find out about the products, which is surely what this was really all about.
The thing I missed most was any sound or animation around the presentation. Buttons need to make sound and the products need a fun, interactive presentation in the promotional interface, rather than having to open more windows. Although this isn’t a hard sell, I’d have liked to have seen the budget and time spent on more user interaction, rather than a behind-the-scenes section. The time spent on the intricate navigation of turning the jar could have been poured into making the product integration tighter.
All of this month’s campaigns pull the viewer in and use rich content and varying levels of interaction to engage, which is at the centre of the attraction economy where we create our ideas. Now all we need is more of the same, with an eye to media like out-of-home and mobile interaction feeding campaign ideas like these. That will make selecting the best work of the month even harder.
Campaign of the Month: Sony Walkman
AGENCY COMMENT
Flo Heiss, executive creative director, Dare London
People are drawn to the Sony Walkman brand because of its heritage and its superior reproduction quality. We needed to appeal to those people who buy an MP3 player to listen to music, rather than as a lifestyle accessory. The way to bring the Walkman brand firmly into the 21st century was to speak emotionally to our customers, handing over control to them and giving them the chance not just to listen to great music but to be part of creating it themselves.
Fallon developed an above-the-line idea that explored the concept of a piece of music being made up of the sum of its component parts. We wanted online users to actually take the component parts and reinterpret them, creating new versions of the same piece of music.
The site holds a specially commissioned piece of music broken down into four parts. Users can download any part either as a musical score or an MP3, then upload their own version of the piece using any instrument they like, from a wooden spoon to a harp. All the contributions are housed on the site and users can mix them to create their own interpretation of the original piece.
In order to allow users to mix different parts to create their version, we had to build a back end that could process all the incoming user contributions and stream any combination of four parts together all in time. We combined the multimedia capabilities of Flash with a video solution designed for video-based user-generated content sites. All submissions are reviewed, the key timing points for the music marked, then they’re published to the site. When a user requests a download of a mix, the four parts are combined by a custom video-processing engine to produce a single video that can be downloaded for later viewing.
In the future we hope to upload new tracks for people to pick apart, re-record and mix their own versions, thus keeping the site current over time.
CLIENT COMMENT
Patrick Butler, head of online, Sony Audio Marketing Europe
Digital channels are playing an increasingly important role in our communications mix and walkmanproject.com is a great example of this. Working with Dare, we’ve produced an innovative site that builds on and extends the above-the-line campaign. In doing so, we’re reasserting Sony Walkman’s unique musical credentials to the substantial proportion of our customers online.
