Zipatoni’s viral marketing for PSP REALLY irritating gamers

The internet isn’t just for porn these days. It’s also a wonderful place to find advertising, as in the case of this new PSP campaign. The above video is from a blog called “alliwantforxmasisapsp,” which features two guys trying to spread the word about convincing family members to get one of them a PSP for Christmas. Except, the whole thing’s less of a blog than a veiled advertising ploy.

Something Awful forumgoers picked up on this video and its accompanying website, and traced it back to its owners: Zipatoni. It didn’t take a very long time for people to figure out that Zipatoni was a marketing company interested in “consumer activation,” and in this case, leading others into thinking about making a PSP purchase. We’re pretty sure they didn’t expect consumers to be active in bashing the site and in spreading the word to every other gaming site out there though.

Much like the PSP graffiti business of 2005, there’s something to be said about knowing the boundaries between advertising and lying. Sony also did something similar with the “We’re not Sony, but we’re close to them” business of the Three Speech blog, which, while informative and actually nifty for grabbing news, is not forthcoming about its actual connections with Sony.

As Aleks Krotoski put it in our source article, “The most important currency online is trust.” It doesn’t help anyone if we know that, deep inside, you’re screaming, “im in ur intarwebz, makin ur viralz!”

Actually, with that kind of lowercase lettering, it’d might be something they could put on their Zipatoni blog.

The internet isn’t just for porn these days. It’s also a wonderful place to find advertising, as in the case of this new PSP campaign. The above video is from a blog called “alliwantforxmasisapsp,” which features two guys trying to spread the word about convincing family members to get one of them a PSP for Christmas. Except, the whole thing’s less of a blog than a veiled advertising ploy.

Something Awful forumgoers picked up on this video and its accompanying website, and traced it back to its owners: Zipatoni. It didn’t take a very long time for people to figure out that Zipatoni was a marketing company interested in “consumer activation,” and in this case, leading others into thinking about making a PSP purchase. We’re pretty sure they didn’t expect consumers to be active in bashing the site and in spreading the word to every other gaming site out there though.

Much like the PSP graffiti business of 2005, there’s something to be said about knowing the boundaries between advertising and lying. Sony also did something similar with the “We’re not Sony, but we’re close to them” business of the Three Speech blog, which, while informative and actually nifty for grabbing news, is not forthcoming about its actual connections with Sony.

As Aleks Krotoski put it in our source article, “The most important currency online is trust.” It doesn’t help anyone if we know that, deep inside, you’re screaming, “im in ur intarwebz, makin ur viralz!”

Actually, with that kind of lowercase lettering, it’d might be something they could put on their Zipatoni blog.