Sony has a true gem in LittleBigPlanet Vita, so it’s important they market it right and, while online advertising is arguably not nearly as important as the televised commercials that have been appearing to promote the Vita lately, this is a cute, and quirky marketing idea that has the potential to go viral on a small scale.
The ‘LittleBigPlanet Web Widget‘ is a button you can add to your bookmark bar, that allows you to throw stickers all over your favorite websites, then submit your wonderful works of art to Sony for the chance to win a PlayStation Vita. The web widget is fun to play around with because it lets you: re-size, and rotate stickers to any size or angle you’d like, and a really interesting albeit flawed touch is how the widget replaces a pages background along with all of the pictures on a site, while (trying) to not affect navigational, theme, and icon images. As you can see above, this works to a point (most menu buttons on the left are unchanged, but all of our sharing icons in the top right are sacked).
Like most of PlayStation’s interactive online marketing efforts, the web widget is hosted on Facebook (thus the small scale viral potential). On paper this all seems like a really clever idea where Facebook users will ‘Like’, and share the LBP web widget with all their friends and awkward online acquaintances to spread the word about LBP Vita; but I fear most visitors will grab the widget, and make like a bandit; immediately running to their favorite websites (ie: not Facebook) while forgoing any opportunity to ‘share’ the widget. Hell, I didn’t even think to go back and ‘Like’ the page until after all of this humdrum journalistic contemplation, and then when someone does like the page, it shows up on their feed as “X liked PlayStation Access” with a PS symbol, which means absolutely nothing to anyone.
This post was originally going to be all about: sunshine, robot penises, and general optimism, but somehow Sony seems to of fallen into their classic Achille’s heel: great ideas with sloppy execution. But still, at the end of the day, it’s a fun little toy to play around with.
Why don’t you fine readers share some Sackboy approved vandalized sites in the comments section below?
