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For Love of Promotion, Sony Stages Awkward ’Theft’

 

Posted on February 25, 2010
Angela Natividad

 

In Amsterdam proper there are these giant letters that spell "I Amsterdam," the city slogan. They’re kind of like the "Hollywood" sign in the sense that they’re a well-known, highly-visible fixture.

This week, the "AM" part of the slogan went missing. This drew so much attention that agency Amsterdam Partners reported them stolen.

Time revealed it was all just part of a guerrilla stunt by Sony, which left a giant piece of origami in the big gaping space between "I" and "sterdam."

The big origami thing is supposed to be a reference to Heavy Rain, a new game Sony’s released and is trying to promote. Apparently the missing "A" and "M" also appeared on Marktplaats, the Dutch variant of eBay, courtesy of seller "Erik Gilliroam" — an anagram for Origami Killer, who is a character in the game.

The whole thing vaguely reminds us of 42 Entertainment’s (successful) scavenger hunt-style campaigns for Halo 2 and Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero album. Both efforts baited users with a strange and seductive series of offline and online puzzles to solve, culminating in what could only be labeled as a video game played out in real-life.

So with all that in mind, we can kinda see where Sony tried to go with the whole Origami Killer/"AM" theft thing, but maybe they didn’t take the idea to all the places it could have gone. For its part, Amsterdam Ad Blog suggests the campaign did little more than elicit a collective "Meh" from the folk of Amsterdam — most of which were probably not Sony’s target demo anyway.


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1. Friday 30 April 2010 attime 23:12, :: http://www.culture-buzz.com/blog/Fo...

well it is a pathetic attempt by sony. i do hope the dutch sue their pants off!

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