Sony caught faking PSP fan site

Adam Turner
Friday, 15 December 2006 23:48

Your IT - Home IT

Sony has confessed to faking a fan site for its PSP handheld games console in order to drum up Christmas sales.

All I Want for Xmas is a PSP appeared to be a blog created by two friends enamored with the PlayStation Portable games console, complete with a YouTube video of one rapping about wanting his parents to buy him a PSP for Christmas. The site included greeting cards and T-shirt iron-on patterns dedicated to the PSP.

Visitors to the site, suspicious of the duo's over-enthusiasm and misuse of slang terms, did some digging and discovered all was not as it appeared. The blog's domain name is registered to Zipatoni, a marketing firm that specialises in "integrated multimedia marketing initiatives" and lists Sony as a client.

After a barrage of accusation in the blog's comments section, Sony confessed the site is a sham and posted the following;

"Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP."

It's not the first time Sony's PSP viral marketing campaigns have run into trouble, with last year's US graffitti advertising campaign drawing criticism from politicians.