Viral Highlights: Sony Vs Microsoft – the marketing game is on and it looks like Sony in winning!
Branded Viral Chart: You might be forgiven for thinking that the size of your marketing budget is directly proportional to how successful your ad will be. Yeah ok, money does help. We’ve seen some pretty awesome viral videos top the chart that certainly wouldn’t have been possible without a huge amount of money behind them. But if there’s one thing that advertisers can learn from looking at what’s trending on YouTube, it’s that size doesn’t really matter, it’s what you do with your money that counts, and Sony has topped this week’s listings with a pretty nice example of effective low budget marketing.
Clocking up nearly 13 million views and over 25 thousand shares this week, is the official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video, released on June 10th to promote the launch of the new PS4. Interestingly, Sony also released Greatness Awaits (another video advertising the PS4) on the same day, but to date this second video has about 12 million views less than the first. So which ad had the big media spend? Well, not the one you might think!
The concept behind the Used Game Instructional Video is pretty simple; to have a sneaky dig at arch rival Microsoft over recent controversy regarding restrictions on second hand Xbox games. The ad spot highlights the fact that Sony has confirmed that the PS4 won’t require online check-in and there’ll be no limitations on trading disc-based games. It starts off looking like a tutorial to explain a complicated system to allow users to share a game with a friend then cuts to a clip of one man just handing the disk to another - simples!
It’s about 20 seconds long, was produced in-house and was clearly made on a shoe-string budget, yet it managed to include just the right viral hook to appeal to the humour of the gaming community and went viral over night.