Ryan MacMillan

Earlier this year we launched the sexy Flash site for Sony’s Blu-ray site designed and developed by Hi-Res!. And while its a pretty young thing that will work beautifully as a destination site it’s not doing much to get out and engage with consumers. The next stage of this campaign has been to actually get Sony into the Blu-ray conversation by creating assets, snippets and digital morsels of interest to Blu-ray’s various audiences.

One of the lessons we learnt on the BRAVIA Balls campaign was that if the audience is genuinely interested in the content created for a campaign they’ll pick it up and spread it themselves. The user distributed advertising of the Balls advert resulted in over 11 million views (at last count) of the actual advert and many more of the related assets and spoofs. But that was a pretty spectacular advert and that’s an incredibly broad audience. What we’re hoping to achieve with the Blu-ray campaign is create slighlty more modest assets that are of interest to more targetted niche audiences.

Which is not to say that there isn’t a georgeous advert at the heart of the awareness element of the campaign. The team from Fallon went of to Prague and shot a haunting esoteric piece of footage and still images replete with wolves, raining cars and gladiatorial wars. Well you just would wouldn’t you? And of course we are keen for consumers to see these, like them, link to them, borrow them, twist them up and generally get amongst them like they did with the Balls and Paint adverts.

To encourage this we have released the assets of the campaign under a Ceative Commons license. As far as I can tell this is a world first - if you want to take that is some indicator of innovation. The license is basically giving comsumers explicit permission to do what we hope they are going to do the content anyway; share it and remix it. There’s more detail in this post.

A significant change since our first Sony foray into social media is the rise of networking sites and the attendant blog badges and widgets. We’ll be releasing a number of these for Blu-ray to appeal to different audiences but the first one off the presses is an embeddable Flash Player so users can take the advert video and post it on their own sites. While this has always been possible with embeddable YouTube video we’ve given them a schmick Blu-ray themed video player that also comes with a range of Blu-ray themed treats. Some more musings on Flash Players here.

As the campaign unfolds we’ll also be relasing more niche widgets and treats for specific audiences. We’re working with Tom and Pat over at Acknowledgement to develop these and they are now at various stages of development and signoff.

The first one is available and its an iCal application. The application populates the users calendar with the release dates of titles available on the Blu-ray format. Its updated as more titles become available.

And how is all of this being promoted? The work of identifying interested parties and getting the word out is being done by immeadiate future who we have now worked with on a couple of Sony campaigns. The area of blog relations is a new and growing discipline and I’ll be posing more about this as the campaign unfolds and we learn more.