It doesn't always go right. So let's take a look at a couple of examples where it hasn't gone to plan. I should mention that these two examples of cautionary tales have nothing to do with myself or my previous agency. The first one regards, Sony now a bit of background on Sony PlayStation as a brand. We're all fairly familiar with it. I was old enough to remember the original PlayStation one launch and I was just about going clubbing and going out socializing and in kind of bars and so forth.
PlayStation were very clever in the approach to marketing in the early days previously, computer games consoles were very much thought of at least as a children's toy. PlayStation came along and squarely focused on the 18 to 25 year old market, mostly males by producing a number of really cool looking games in listing hot shop designers like designers Republic and Britain to help them with the look and feel of their flagship launch game Wipeout. They also hired DJs and artists to create up to date contemporary, cool dance music, soundtracks to their games. Then they took the console out into the field, places like nightclubs and bars where people could play the games themselves and experience the power of the PlayStation. And they did extremely well. It was one of the best selling consoles ever launched and their approach to youth marketing and developing this kind of social and cultural currency was really beyond compare.
They were a brand who really did have permission to speak to the youth in a youthful way that earned that right by providing entertainment and by providing excellent content well over a decade now. So when they launched the PlayStation Portable, they had every right if you like to produce a kind of campaign that would be edgy. streetwise, an appeal to again, the young, predominantly male demographic for this handheld gaming machine. The launch campaign consisted of spray painted characters with spiralize. And the PlayStation Portable gaming device featured as a skateboard or, you know, as some kind of backdrop to these characters lives. There was no text, there was no web address.
So it was quite brave in that regard. And these large graffiti characters appeared in urban areas across the states. problems began with local residents complained about the graffiti appearing everywhere when they realized the major brand was behind it. They found graffiti to be a sign of criminality, lowered the tone of their their neighborhood, perhaps even lowering the prices of the houses. Controversy of this sort usually does a brand like this no harm. However, the real problems arose when graffiti writers, the very people they were aiming to appeal to got winded that the fact that the campaign wasn't actually guerrilla.
In other words, they paid for the space where the graffiti characters were and some instances they actually removed the billboards. authenticity is absolutely key to the culture of graffiti. So this came across like watching your dad dancing at a disco. Not cool. Perhaps the most notorious publicity stunt of all time is this project for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a cartoon on the Cartoon Network channel. The agency use light brights to recreate the character and back them onto a magnetic surface.
They then place the surface onto bridges onto shutters, anything metallic around the city of Boston. It was a fairly harmless idea until one woman saw one of these boxes underneath the bridge and notice the wires sticking out the battery in the lights. She didn't know who the character was and panicked she called the police. Reports began to come in of other boxes around the city of Boston. So the police arrived on the side of caution closing the whole city down and blocking off roads for hours. The stunt frightened and inconvenience millions of people.
Not to mention the client was fined $2 million to pay for the police time. sackings and resignations followed Nonetheless, the stunk created worldwide news coverage for the TV show. So is this a case of all publicity being good publicity? I'll let you answer that question yourself.