Launching a console can't be easy. You pour millions into developing a brand new machine, years developing a stonking line-up of games to go alongside it - and then you have to go about the tricky task of actually making people want it. While raising awareness amongst the hardcore is easy enough - a few well placed press releases, or a cool YouTube video will spread like wildfire - getting the general public interested in your brand new console is something few have really perfected - beyond Nintendo. And even they stumbled with the Wii U.
Sony, meanwhile, has a somewhat spottier track record when it comes to getting the message across. Their advertising campaign for the PS3 was nothing if not bizarre, featuring a bunch of psychopaths unwinding in a hotel, a man dancing on a check-in desk, and a grenade being carried by a manicured dog, while showing nothing of the console, nor the games in question. It was a weird in a way that would put most perfume ads to shame. Meanwhile, the PS2 had an equally surreal campaign, directed by Twin Peaks director David Lynch, that dived into an even stranger world of giant floating women and regurgitated arms, while again showing nothing of the new console.
For the recently revealed Playstation 4 adverts, though, it seems Sony have decided to take a much more... normal tack, if normal is a word you can really apply to the trailer below. Instead of a drug induced dream scape, we're treated to a grey and gritty trailer to the tune of Lou Reed's Perfect Day. Showing two young guys fighting in an Elder Scrolls Online inspired landscape, the ad switches to a high speed tussle between two super cars in a scene ripped from launch racer Driveclub, before finishing up on the battlefield in a real life version of Killzone: Shadow Fall. Despite risking life and limb as the juke it out across a range of PS4 game inspired scenarios, the two guys never stop singing "Perfect Day" to each other. It's almost kind of sweet. You can see the whole thing for yourself below.
But while it's certainly more sensible than the previous Playstation adverts, we can't help but feel the ad represents something of a missed opportunity, if only for one, main reason. Why is it just the same two competitive guys, fighting all the way through? Is that really the only market the Playstation 4's targeting? While it's often been assumed that only the hardest of the hardcore buy a machine at launch, the games industry has come a heck of a way since the last group of machines were launched. With the average player being a touch below 40, with just under half of the audience being female, it does seem a bit strange that the ad only shows the same two young guys all the way through, as it could so easily have appealed to a much larger group of people. Why could it not have been a family racing against each other on Driveclub? Would a scene showing a young child interacting with Knack, before teaming up with their parent have gone amiss - not to mention showing there's more than just combat/racing themed games on the PS4?
While they arguably haven't missed as much of an open goal as Nintendo's Wii U advert, in which the only woman featured in the entire clip was indifferent to the console at best, or actively hostile at worst (I want to watch the TV now), we can't help but think it's about time the games industry broadened their horizons from an advertising perspective. But as what's only the first advert in what we'd expect to be a whole series, and with a concept that's distinctly more grounded in reality than their previous games, the PS4 ad campaign is at least off to a better start than before.
What do you think of the new Playstation 4 ad? Feel free to leave a comment below.
