Sony Uses Graffiti to Promote PSP

Posted on January 5, 2006

Wired reports that Sony is using graffiti drawings of urban kids playing with PSPs to promote the PSP brand. Wired says Sony is paying the buildings owners to put graffiti on their walls. The campaign may have gone over just find if it were not for the fact that Sony had recently infected people who purchased Sony music CDs with spyware. This was all over the blogosphere recently in case you missed it. The Wired article discuss some graffiti criticism coming out of San Francisco.

Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers' computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, the campaign for the PlayStation Portable is being derided on the internet as an attempt to buy the credibility of street art.

In San Francisco, critics have expressed their disapproval by adding some spray paint of their own to the Sony ads. On a wall outside a beer garden in San Francisco's bohemian Mission District that caters to motorcyclists and bike messengers, someone spray-painted over every character, adding the commentary, "Advertising directed at your counter-culture."

Outside Casa Maria, a small Mission bodega, someone wrote, "Get out of my city," added the word "Fony" to the graffiti and penned a four-line ditty slamming Sony.

Other cities targeted in the campaign include New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Miami, according to Sony spokeswoman Molly Smith.

The Guardian's Gamesblog says the campaign is also not going over well in Philadelphia. Sony has been hit with a cease-and-desist order in this city and the graffiti is being painted over.

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