A new line of Sony PSP ads touting the upcoming white PSP goes so far beyond reasonable decorum they defy description.
The ads, which have been rolled out in Amsterdam, are so racially charged it would take a four-year-old about two seconds to realize they’re just plain wrong. In the ads, a white woman with bad hair and a mean scowl is grabbing the face of a black woman. The writing on the ad simply proclaims: “PlayStation Portable White is coming.”
Makes me want to rush out and buy three or four PSPs – not!
Kind of makes you wonder who got paid to create this campaign and why. What the heck was Sony thinking? OK, it would appear as if Sony isn’t thinking, at all.
Per Joystiq, Sony, it seems, is claiming the ads are meant only to show the contrast of colors the PSP offers. They’re not meant to send any other message.
Well, that’s just great, but it still seems rather odd that looking on the Dutch PSP site it appears as if Sony’s trying to market the white PSP to whites and the black one to blacks.
Perhaps Sony really didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe they thought having ads where it appears as if one person is about to put a serious hurting on another is a great way to sell their new PSP. Maybe, just maybe, the racial issue never occurred to them.
Yeah, right! Sony's been in trouble before over its PSP ads with much less offensive material. They should know better.
And while there are some images shot for the campaign that have the black woman dominating the white woman, the question still remains: What the heck does this have to do with a portable gaming console?
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