Sony-Ericsson has released a second chapter in their bizarre ad campaign for the Sony Xperia Play Android phone. The Ad, shows confused victim of a crime telling a police officer in some non-descript Asian country that a girl who he took home from an evening at a local club, severed his thumbs and disappeared. The Cops laugh at the irony and then we see the same Android from the first commercial walking through the streets flexing his new game playing digits. Disturbing? You bet. Dark comedic punch line? Absolutely. But will it sell phones?
The tag line for the Xperia Play commericals is “Android is ready to play.” Meaning that with the Xperia Play’s ability to play Playstation style games with built in game controls, the Android Platform has become a serious gaming platform. Which it is. Not only does the Xperia come with gaming capability, but also has access to up to 50 original Playstation One video games. Sony is also making some titles available through NVidia’s Tegra Zone to expand it’s reach.
When chapter one of the ad’s story was broadcast during the SuperBowl, we theorized that the Android’s new thumbs came from some cadaver somewhere and were put on the Android as part of a Frankenstein-esque surgical procedure. With chapter two, we see that the thumbs were unceremoniously donated by some poor guy looking to get lucky with a woman he met in a bar, and that gives the story a dark, but ironic layer.
But in today’s MTV machine gun cut story telling style, does this campaign go a long way to pay off a punchline? It rather reminds me of the infamously disasterous “churros” campaign from Microsoft. And yet, I am strangely drawn to it and want to know if there’s more to this dark story. Hopefully, the XPeria Play will be successful enough to warrant seeing more of it.
Silly commercial. I want the dang phone already!
I find this ad and its sequel intensely disturbing. First of all, it presents Third World people (“non-descript Asian country”) as barbaric; second of all, it makes practices common to torture a joke; and third of all, it paints the Android mascot as willing to take poor, dark people’s body parts in order to play a game. Disgusting, I would say.