There’s been a lot of backlash lately against Sony and the graffiti style ads for its popular PSP game console that have popped up on graffiti covered sections of various urban locations. Some of the dissing is a bit harsh but, let’s face it, well-deserved. Wired magazine even did a piece about it. What’s at issue here is that people tend to get mad when they feel like the big, bad corporate man is trying to sneak in on their creative culture and cash out by exploiting it. They get real mad. In general, people have an uncanny ability to see right through a fake that is trying to pass itself off as real. Most of the time (we’ll come back to this in a minute). And seriously, what the heck was Sony thinking with those ads? Did they really think that those poorly-conceived, poorly-illustrated, poorly-propped (a jack-in-the-box?) figures were going to blend in with the wondrous cacophony of spray paint tags, guerilla-art posters, crap graffiti and really lovely cutting-edge pieces by some serious street artists? Did they think this campaign would be seen as ‘cool’? Ahem. Obviously Sony, usually pretty good with this sort of thing, misread the context and misunderstood the target audience and the visual language that would have to be spoken to be allowed to participate. The Sony art director responsible for this lame concept and those lame illustrations has probably already been put out to pasture.

There are, however, recent examples of the big, bad corporate man being allowed to stay outside and play. The Adidas Adicolor billboard campaign has been given the collective thumbs-up by streeters and bloggers alike. The gist of the Adicolor scheme is that Adidas puts up a blank billboard, it gets graffito’d on over time, and then Adidas comes back around and puts up a shoe cut-out over the art. Et Voila! The Adicolor concept writ large. Cool site beinghunted has a great time-lapse pictorial of the process. Woostercollective and Josh Spear, among others, have put up pieces about it too. The concept for the shoe line done as ‘cooperative’ advertising.

 

But let’s get back to this idea that people have an uncanny ability to see right through a fake that is trying to pass itself off as real. The Sony PSP thing is obvious. Painfully so. Sony gets called out for paying someone to paint a prescribed figure on a wall and pretend it’s the same as everything else on the wall around it. The taggers and artists freak out. But let’s take a closer look at the Adicolor campaign. In this first photo we see the Adidas billboard covered in graffiti. Looks crazy but legitimate. The second photo shows the Adidas shoe cutout plastered over it. The desired ‘customized’ effect is achieved. Everyone thinks it’s cool. But a closer look at the billboard shows a string of names at the bottom. The word ‘overkill’ stands out. Waitaminute! That sounds familiar! Let’s look back at the previous, pre-shoed billboard…

What the…! The word ‘overkill’ appears again and again in different forms all over the thing. Actually ‘overkillshop.com’ shows up too. A quick search reveals that overkillshop is a store in Berlin (where these billboards are located). And what do they sell? Well, wouldn’t ya know?! Shoes! With the Adidas Adicolor line featured heavily. What does this mean? Well, it is pure speculation…but… one might guess that Adidas and/or Overkill made sure that those billboards were tagged just the way they wanted them to be. What has been touted as Adidas in not-so-many-words ‘inviting’ taggers to leave their mark was actually an ‘assignment’ to the featured retailers to make sure the billboards looked the way they should.

In a comparison of the two brands, it seems both Sony and Adidas paid graffiti artists to paint up something (a wall or a billboard) to connect their brand to the ’street’ public. The only difference is in where the brand enforced it’s art-directional control. Sony from the beginning up. And Adidas at the very end. Has an urban art form been co-opted for a brand’s purposes? Have we, the public, been taken for a ride? Pretty much ‘yes’ on both counts. But still the public’s verdict for each has been markedly different. Why? Because of that one difference. Sony came up with it’s own lame, homogenous, graffitied image. Adidas, on the other hand, allowed its image to get sloppy (even if by contract) only to be packaged as the culminating finale. Granted, they are both different products with different design theses, but Adidas showed the more shrewd approach to ‘virile marketing’. Allow the public to think that they are having their way with your brand. Then use it to your own ends. Point – Adidas.