f l u e n c y f u m b l e

In what appears to be the conclusion to a terrifically backfired attempt at viral marketing, Sony has come clean on its “funky fresh” fake blog at alliwantforxmasisapsp.com:

As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn’t a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.

Sony Computer Entertainment America

The blog — host to professionally designed e-cards, links to Sony’s official sites and posts with titles like, “you advertize. they recognize!” — didn’t appear to be fooling many. Here are a few comments on “a list of things you can be doing with your hands that are less attractive or more annoying than playing a psp:

16: MAKE A FA KE WEB_@SITE AND PRET @END YOU ARE KIDS WHEN ACTUALLY YOURE A M@ _R K E_TING A_G3NC Y
— ”sony@aol.com”

15. Typing up ‘posts’ for this ‘Blog’
— “Not buying any of it”

16 Make up fake websites for Sony to acti vate their consu mers.
— “laffs”

It was perhaps an attempt to capture the spirit of the Internet’s great unadvertised advertising, viral marketing that depends on word of mouth (paste of link?) to raise consumer awareness of products and services. Past successes in this area include Burger King’s Subservient Chicken and Google’s Gmail, which allowed users a certain number of “invites” to send to friends.

Sony failed to mention why the blog jig is up, but it may just have something to do with this week’s FTC ruling that “companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.”

Busted.