Sony Walkman Project

They finally got the video sorted out – here it is on YouTube.

An email from Immediate Future, the Sony PR team, the same ones who have been sending me stuff on the Sony Bravia Pay Doh ad, points me towards a new campaign, or Project, that is being rolled out for the Sony Walkman. There’s a new ad on UK TV airing tomorrow, again done by Fallon who did Sony PlayDoh for the Bravia (and Cadbury’s Gorilla). Sony Walkman, the first big market portable personal player, started the trend of having your music with you all the time, a space that is now dominated by the iPod. The new ad seems to be the start of a longer campaign – the are teasing a lot to come.

The first thing on the site is a request to record the song in any way you like – or later to remix contributions. You can download the track or the individual elements, or even just the score, to make your own version. They then need you to record it on video on upload. Reading the T&Cs, it looks like you still own what you produce, even if you do grant Sony full licence to use it. That’s a better deal than many of these I’ve seen where the lawyers want full ownership.

Apparently the ad (supposed to be on the site soon) is “the first ever ‘monophonic’ advert – in which 128 musicians play only note at a time to reconstruct an original music piece created by Hollywood music director Peter Raeburn.” The full press release is over on the Sony site.

The new WALKMAN commercial continues Sony Consumer Electronics’ tradition of producing authentic ads that can be ‘done for real’. This meant using 98 microphones to record the track, 3 days to film it, one take to shoot it and 128 musicians that had to last 30 seconds without making any mistakes.

One interesting quote from that release is “On top of that Sony’s commitment to ‘not faking it’ meant that we then had to film the whole sequence in one take. The end result justifies the means though!” Fascinating given Sony’s past history with fake blogs. Hopefully, this means that Sony have learnt a lesson and there’ll be no more of that.

I also see that they are extending the use of the phrase “like.no.other” to other products. I’ve only seen it on the Bravia ads so far, but I like the phrase, giving the idea of being best in class but not really claiming that ;)

Update: Due to a ‘media schedule’ muddle, the ad is still not live on the new site. They changed the site from the old holding page version to a newer interactive version, but did not update the video yet. The PR team have let me know that it should be up later. They also answered a couple of questions for me.

• How many takes did they do before they got it right? The Sony Walkman advert took Fallon two days of rehearsal and 4 takes to get it just right.
• Is like.no.other now being used across the Sony portfolio? Yes, the like.no.other strapline is being used across the Sony portfolio and includes colour.like.no.other, music.like.no.other, entertainment.like.no.other.
• I asked about “On top of that Sony’s commitment to ‘not faking it’ meant that we then had to film the whole sequence in one take. The end result justifies the means though!” The quote purely refers to the fact that, in line with Sony’s brief, Fallon filmed the advert in one 30 second take, thereby ensuring the ad was not cut into and the music was not added at a later stage.
  
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