A little look at advertising

Analysis of a print ad. May 3, 2006

I decided to describe a PlayStation ad which was created to launch the hardware. It is a very simple ad which looks very sober. However I don’t think that an ad must be complicated to be good. This ad was successful because people who saw it were asking themselves what it was meant. In fact, there were a lot of ads looking like this one with the four icons of the paddle’s buttons which evoke the PlayStation universe.In this ad, we can only see a gear shift with the four symbols of the main paddle buttons (the cross, the square, the circle and the triangle). It is this detail which attracts the consumer’s mind. Indeed, the consumer is asking himself why he sees this symbol and not the figures of the typical gears. Then he looks at the text which is under and quickly understands that this is an ad for the new Playstation. We cannot see other details on this picture because the background is deliberately blurred except for the PlayStation logo.This ad symbolizes the fact that the new PlayStation games are more realistic and that they give real sensations to the players. This ad was specially designed for all men who like cars and not only for the male players who are fond of car video games. It is an ad especially made for the young drivers but also for the older ones who like driving sensations.It is a very contrasting picture because it refers both to our world and to the virtual world. It departs from other ads whose message is that life is a game. Indeed, the text of this picture says that if we want to live normally we have our real world, and if we want to escape from the real world and take the risk of having sensation we have the virtual world in which we can play thanks to the Playstation 2.

I found that this ad is quite good because its simplicity is a good way to endorse the quality of the Playstation 2 without putting off people who do not like video games. It is also a good message for the ones who think that video games are dangerous for people because they think that players do not see the difference between the real and the virtual world. Indeed, this ad says that life is not a game but if we want to have fun and play we have “the other world” (another slogan of the Playstation) thanks to the Playstation 2. Thus, this ad is very different from the previous ones, and that is interesting in the history of video game advertising. That is why we can also say that it is both a promotional and an institutional ad, and that makes its power.