Remember SMEBS..? The Social Media Burnout Syndrome? Sure you must remember, back in February Marcus Brown came over to London and did a brilliant Garden of Tweetdom evening, including a piece about people suffering from terrible social media addictions.
SMEBS Watch – Meet Andrew from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.
More information on SMEBS watch.
So the new news is that Sony VAIO launched a campaign, apparently created by Nascom in Belgium and basically ripped the concept off completely. That makes the Kaiser angry. And the Hippo too (Why not, and people should know not to fuck with hippos, they kill more people in Africa than any other animal apparently).
As Marcus says in this post, just ask for god’s sake. We all know there’s stealing, sopying and plagiarism in the advertising industry, but when it’s so blatant have the decency of asking.
What I actually find even weirder is that I don’t like the campaign at all. I don’t understand what the hell it has to do with Sony VAIO and doesn’t seem to portray VAIO owners in a good light. Sure, one easy way to view it is that VAIOs are so good that you can’t your hands off them.
Another interpretation is that Twitter / Facebook / etc are so addictive it has nothing to do with the computer.
Yet another one, and what I thought immediately was that VAIO users were obviously a bunch of worthless, sad weak willed junkies – so the computer can’t be worth that much either.
I wonder how much Sony really wants to be directly associated with addictive behaviours, actually drugs and support Anonymous type groups..?
I would be interested in having more of other people’s opinions about this, both about the plagiarism and thoughts about the campaign.
And actually, one more thing to finish. It just occured to me that I usually say that for any communications to be successful and generate conversations, they need to be polarising. And this one is. I don’t like it and am campaigning about it.
That actually sounds like a pretty good job in my book.
