There were a number of stories that I never got around to in 2005, sometimes because they had interesting angles worth pursuing and I kept putting them off. The nice thing is, most of the best stories are continuing to make news.
On the music industry front, Sony made a couple of major mistakes that are still creating negative headlines. Their attempt at a graffiti style ad campaign for the PlayStation Portable backfired in the major cities where they’ve appeared. In San Francisco, multiple ads were defaced, possibly by members of Sony’s target market, in a manner that indicated that the ads were viewed as incursions on community space.
Though the ads are said to be legal and on rented space, some Philadelphians are upset over the fact that the ads look too much like graffiti and the city is responding to their concerns that the campaign undermines anti-graffiti activities. New Yorkers are also expressing similar concerns.
In some ways, the PSP campaign is a minor problem for Sony and part of a larger context in which advertising will continue to find ways to creep into people’s consciousness where they’re not expecting it. When boundaries get pushed, outcomes are unpredictable. In this case, both anti-graffiti activists and individuals who are possibly street artists are attacking the campaign. But a more serious issue is Sony’s misuse of digital rights management on their music cds which I’ll post about separately.
