PS3 bike commercial: This is living? This isn't even trying

Damn. Where's my checkbook. I need to rush out and get one of those ps3s.

What? I can't ride on it and do tricks like in that commercial? So what the heck were they doing showing all those guys on bikes? Oh well I can get a real bike for much less and it will give me all the "free motion" that I need.
Then again I like crab. Maybe I could crack one of those things open and eat it.

I must disagree with a few things.

For one, I love that 360 commercial. It shows people playing a game. A game that looks like real life. With people joining as it goes on. I think it mirrors the capabilities Microsoft was emphasizing well, without spelling it out.


Also, I hate British accents, I find them horribly unattractive. Before any of our UK friends get terribly offended by that, I find many others unattractive as well, including most of the US dialects, and would have no trouble believing others would find my accent unattractive.



Lastly, thank you for the password feature.

Really come on...I could see PS3 boasting about graphics and power and the ability to summon rain due to the cell processor, but thier is not way in HELL, Heaven or Earth Sony can even think of beginning to compare it's (tilt only) controller, to the Wii's TRUELY innovation sense ALL controller. Who are they trying to convince.

PS3 controller: Wii controller:
1.tilt 1.both have full tilt
2.button mashing 2.laser precision
3.depth/distance sensing
4.rumble
5.fully adjustable settings
6.speaker/sound feedback

"Cyling is a big deal in Europe if you didn't get the memo. The Tour de France. The fact that they were invented there. A form of travel."

This commercial is not about cycling. It's about freestyle BMX. If you don't know the difference then you shouldn't be posting as though you do."

Those two comments right there from above post, show why that commericals is lame an ineffective. The commercial isn't suposed to be about cycling or BMX biking it is supposed to be about the PS3. If people are are saying it is about anything else the commercial as offcially failed.

Notice that the person saying the commercial is about cycling catoring to Europe is defending the PS3 commercial, and this is what they got from it. So cheers to sony for another half assed attempt to get anybody to give a damn about your system.

The xbox360 "Jump In" ads kick the pants off ANY Sony ad, including the fancy Bravia ads with the exploding paint and the bouncy balls.

Playing Cops and Robbers is a helluva lot better analogy to playing games than freestyle BMX.

oh geez, it's a fucking commercial. you guys will use any excuse to spread FUD, won't you?

Has anyone seen the 360 commercial in the train station with the massive gun finger shootout? Freaking hilarious. I only wish things like that happened in real life...

Throwing monkey waste at the wall?

You could do better. I don't think you're putting enough effort into hating on Sony here.

"The commercial has officially failed?"

Yeah, it's getting free play on a gaming site. What a failure this ad is.

Was I the only one who saw the US ad with CoD3 footage in it? It aired shortly after the PS3 actually came out. It is odd that most of the ads don't air game footage, but at least one did.

Like the last ad from England, it's not as god forsakenly stupid as the US PS3 commercials.

...but it's still kinda dumb. The thing is, I don't know what they're advertising. It's not a video game ad and it's really not all that effective, as a result. There are other commercials that do this, too, only they're more effective. As much as I hate them, ads for prescription drugs in particular do this kinda of analogy adverts all the time.
I think it's a matter of asking who they're advertising to. ALL the PS3 commercials I've seen kinda aim at no one. It's like a brand awareness campaign only.
It's great that I know about the (over priced, over hyped, etc) PS3. But it doesn't give me a reason to WANT the product, really.

Go watch an advertisement about beer or deodourant and try and pick how much is god damn relevant to the actual product or even better, find a commerical that doesn't show the product at all... I guess I'll be jumping out of building if I put some Lynx or Axe spray on because that MUST be product orientated?

Sony don't make the ads. Advertising agencies do. Sony is just the client. And they aren't selling the Playstation 3. They are selling the Playstation image. And these aren't for American's anyway, hence no guns, stars and stripes and a diluted dumb down message for everyone.

Don't think your a fucking advertising expert just because you watched the ad and didn't get it. Advertising isn't getting it forced down your throat, its freedom of choice which is why I never had the impulse to buy tampons.

bad commercial

To #39: I honestly thought he was being sarcastic. It didn't even occur to me that someone might find a british accent sexy. I like britian, and I love british shows (Mile High is my latest find. Thank you BBCA), but this american, at least, doesn't remotely find female british accents attractive. I'm not saying british women are unattractive or anything, but let's be honest, when you think "sexy accent", britian is pretty near the bottom.

@Jonathan

Deodorant and beer don't have features, and you can't exactly visualize smell and taste, so they must think of some other way to advertise it.

The PS3 has features. And these are poorly presented with stupid analogies (cupstackers process a million things around them... umm yeah right?) and boring ads. They show a few seconds of game play to try to show you whatever the hell they were trying to make clear with their analogies, and then a stupid tag line.

Even if Sony isn't making these ads themselves, they must've okay'd this crap and hired a cheap advertising agency.

21.

The reason those tricks look unimpressive is because the ad has been cut and edited in a way so you dont get to really see the tricks.
Believe me, flatland BMX is EXTREMELY impressive to watch.

to all those going on about how this was 'freestyle' bmx, this is not freestyle, this is flatland.

The ad seems like many of the other ads that are being churned out by advertising agencies, I don't think this is particularly unique to Sony.

I think it rather comical that there are calls for Sony to tell the truth about the system capabilities. According to Microsoft we are experiencing a 'gaming renaissance' with the launch of Vista. Does anyone actually think this is true?

They all lie, and exaggerate, and in order to get our attention in a mass of competing ads they have to lie and exaggerate more and more. I think that Microsoft are being given an easy time of late. Perhaps we should start bashing them about having a one game console (until Halo 3 and then it will have two games) and asking when we are going to see this 'next generation' they all promised. Everything seems to be a rerun of games I already played.

Jonathan Wong, you are an idiot.

First, I don't really appreciate the anti-American mentality. Second, they aren't selling the Playstation brand, they're selling the PS3 by emphasizing one feature of it, specifically the Sixaxis controller (much in the same way that the cup-stacking ad was trying to sell the PS3 by emphasizing the Cell processor). Third, we're not claiming that we're advertising experts - we're claiming that this advertisement doesn't work for us, and telling why. Also, just because I don't agree with something doesn't mean that I don't "get it"; failing artists have been using that excuse for years, and no one has ever bought it. Fourth, (and somewhat off topic) advertising is getting forced down our throats by nearly every form of media known to man - don't even try to challenge that.

The problem is that we all know what the technology in the controller is. Sidewinder stuff from Microsoft from about 8 years ago.

However Jo public does not necessarily know this. Marketing is taking advantage of people's ignorance as well as selling a product. We may all complain but to a person who does not play games that often it's new.

Remember that valuable lesson!

Grunge summed it up quite nicely.

I'm going to have to disagree. Advertising has ALWAYS been about selling the product/brand to the target market. So unless a) teens/youths really like whatever they were doing on the bike, I think this advertisement would have failed. Simply because it focuses on all the wrong aspects. If they had focused more on games, on the blu-ray, on the power of the cell-processor, then yeah, I could understand where they're coming from. But focusing on free-styling or whatever? Thats just weird, unless the target market likes that.

English accent rules :P

And no, we don't all go around saying "A cup of tea dear chap, a jolly fine day it is". Only royalty does that

"British accent? That's what we Europeans call english. That's what they speak in England and that's what the rest of us learn in schools. Why would you have someone speaking with an american accent in a commercial?"

LOL. Yes, we Americans are a silly bunch to ask a question like that.

This commerical is the best of the PS3 commercials so far. But really... why are they bad at all? The Bravia commercials rocked. And I remember this one PS2 commerical (which I can't for the life of me find) where a guy is seeing all these signs that coincidently lead him to save a little girl's life: "Live in your world, Play in ours." Brilliant! And of course the PS9 commercial.

I just don't get it. The slogan "This is living" had nothing to do with commercial. Is flatland biking living? Is stacking cups living? In that old commercial I mentioned the ad showed what the slogan means... isn't that's how it's supposed to go?

" We're also a little confused about the sultry British woman's accent in the commercials. Does the British accent turn Europeans on as much as it does Americans?"

What?
Well... she has a British accent because she's British and this ad is airing in England! You know... Europe is a continent full of different countries with different languages, it's not as if they will air it in Germany or something.

meh, the ps2 had equally as awful ads and it still sold. For some reason people lap up the pretentious crap sony feeds them, which is a shame, because the adverts are really friggn bad. At least the 360/wii ads make them look fun, every ps3 ad ive seen so far makes the thing look like an evil death monolith that will kill your children if you dont buy it.

Female British accents are about the ugliest accents/voices on the planet.

Funny how there is so much debate about how this ad works/doesn't work. Furthermore, the monkey feces flung at the wall is being picked up and hurled back and forth. In the end, everybody's covered, and the ad is still debatable.

To be as objective as possible, you want to consider 2 important points:
(1) Is the ad memorable?
(2) Does it achieve its objective?

If the first point isn't addressed, then the second one certainly will not be. After all, the point of advertising is to promote a business's products/services.

I remember a lot of BMX freestyle riding tricks. Not much more. It certainly didn't incite anybody on this blog to rush out and purchase a PS3, though I did see some excited about the bicycle.

I'll consider this ad to be pretty awful. Most arguements for it have been a pretty far stretch. Cycling is prevelant in Europe? Please. If you have to reason that to yourself after a 30 or 60 second video clip, then you've got quite an imagination.

IMHO, all three console makers' ads have not been achieving the 2 above objectives. Sony and Microsoft have employed very vague anologies for theirs, but at least Microsoft's are more entertaining. Nintendo doesn't either, though I'll give them the most credit so far since the actually show you the product up front, what it does, and how people use it. Appealing to the lowest common denominator may not always be the most creative means, but at least you can tell what is being sold.

Idiots. Just because it doenst hit you over hte head with hte product, doesnt mean is a bad commerical.

This has nothing to do with UK culture o_0

If i saw the ad, i would think it was for sports or bikes, not for an over-hyped console, they should at least make a good ad for the brits since we are getting it last and paying the most =/

@0ldb0y

About the Nintendo adds. While I do not think they are very memorable except for the Music, I think Nintendo has achived the second objective quite well. My Mom saw the commercal with no previous understanding and she hit it in a nut shell: A forgin video game that you swing around to play. It strucked her, and now she wants one.

That was the goal, and I think if my 55 year old Mom understands that, then it was sucessfull.

Likewise, many people I know do not get the 360 expecally if they have no idea what LIVE is. You see a buch of boxes with voices, or people playing in the street and a 360 logo at the end. You have no idea wtf it is or how it works, or wtf it even dose. It would be like stairing at a Mayonase jar for 5 minutes and then putting a Lexus logo at the end of it. Ok, intersting, but WTF would I want to buy Lexus for...dose it come with Mayonase?

I rest my case. -,-;

Such a cute commercial, for the first 30 seconds she went on and on about how great it is to use a Wiimote and then all of a sudden we come to realize she's trying to sell a shitty dualshock 3, excuse me SIXAXIS.

You know, it's one thing copying another person's technology(yes yes I know, motion control existed before)but to blatantly rip it off before launch and then sell it with a thick slab of shit like you were the only proprietor of the technology is just ridiculous.

Nintendo: Hey! Look at our games! See this in game footage? This is how you play with the Wii remote!

Sony: Not since the day Christ walked this blessed Earth, have such miracles been at the tips of ones fingers. Now, only through the Playstation 3 can you experience the control to do whatever you want.

It's FLATLAND.
Not freestyle.
Thanks.
Gimp.

My apologies,I appear to be a total buffoon.It seems to have already been made quite clear what sort of riding they are doing.