Sony sends 80 million petals erupting from a volcano into a quiet Costa Rican village!
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Sony has become famous for iconic marketing campaigns. Not simply because of the stunning visual impact of its ads, but the fact that the stunts involved are actually REAL.
We’ve become so accustomed to elaborate CGI and fancy graphics in advertising that the impact of these campaigns gets diluted in the wash of footage from brands scrabbling to release the next cinematic style masterpiece. So when Sony first sent thousands of coloured bouncing balls cascading through the streets of San Francisco back in 2005, the marketing world hailed the commercial as a landmark event in advertising.
The tech giant followed up the success of Bouncing Balls a year later by exploding 70 thousand litres of paint over a housing estate in Glasgow, in one of my favourite ads of all time. Could the video have been made in CGI? Yes, of course, and it would probably have looked 10 times better and cost half the amount of money, but what made the spot so effective was the fact that the ad agency pulled it off in real life, using 1,700 detonators and spending the best part of a week cleaning the paint up afterwards. The story goes beyond the 60-seconds of final footage, to encompass the entire making of the video, setting it apart from any ad that could have been created in a computer studio.
This week, Sony has continued the theme, teaming up with McCann London to create another visual masterpiece. Four Times the Detail shows stunning footage of over 8 million flower petals erupting from a volcano in Costa Rica, sending waves of colour to engulf a nearby village. As expected, the result is a thing of beauty, intended to demonstrate the impressive clarity of the new 4K TV screens. There’s also a fun behind the scenes video showing exactly how the magic happened.