Sony Makes Better Ads Than Games

Lost interest in PlayStation somewhere around the PSone era. Not a clean break—more the gradual indifference that sets in when a hardware company becomes primarily concerned with its own mythology. The PS2 was fine. The PS3 felt like buying into a brand promise. Microsoft’s version of this problem is somehow worse—the Xbox has always felt like the result of a focus group that decided fun was a market segment—but Sony’s particular self-seriousness has its own texture, and it mostly just gets tiring.

Then they make an ad like this.

There’s a category of commercial that crosses into something else—something that makes you want to pick up a pencil or open a file and make something, for no reason except that someone just made something that moved you. This spot does that. I’ve watched it several times this week. I’m not entirely sure what it’s selling beyond the vague implication of feeling something, which is usually not a promise I trust from a multinational electronics corporation.

But here we are. Sony can’t make me care about their consoles, but someone in their ad department just made a few minutes of film I’ll probably be thinking about for a while.