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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

The Good: Really changed my perception of Sony as a brand. They're a lot more experimental and ahead than I though. I feel like going out and buying a PS4 honestly. Great job on the marketing team. (I actually watched the videos and was... "moved", wireless lens, underwater ear buds, 3d viewer)

The Bad: Over complicated and choppy (anyone else?). It's basically a TV commercial that you have to keep scrolling to watch. I think there are better, simpler, less choppier ways that this brand message could have been conveyed.

Alternative: Slides/pages with full screen video? Take each scene and separate it into it's own full screen "slide" (not slide show but one slide after the other on the page) and each mouse scroll moves you down to the next slide.

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Changed perception? That has to be insane. Just a mere funky web page and you go from not interested to wanting to buy? Good grief. I am stunned that a mere web page can do that for any one in actual reality. You seem far too easily bought. Here, have a shiney thing, there you go...... I had no idea people were so easily manipulated, and equally happy to say so in public.

I really don't get on with these scroll down animated sites.

As usual with these things, I don't see anything useful or informative on the landing part of the page, begin to scroll, see I'm expected to scroll for god knows how long incase there is anything useful, all I usually see is show off animation, I sigh, then close the page.

Why am I suddenly expected to constantly scroll these things? Is it just so some web developer can show off their latest, now tired, seen it all before now, trick?

I want to land on a page, see if its worth anything, then possibly click for more info. If I want to see an animation, video, or what ever, just show the darn thing in a normal video. But I want a choice there, not a silly site that auto starts it, often hurting my ears, or waking up the house, with full volume in the process. If the landing page gives me interest, I'll happily watch a short advert, animation, or whatever to get more info.

Why all this scrolling? There are much simpler ways to show all this, without me having to almost work to get to see it. Its not my message, its theirs. Why are they making it harder for me to see their message? I just left the page.

Just me?

Oh, BTW, I have some magic beans for sale on a pretty website. Any takers?

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No.

Im not in to lying, hiding and pretending. I dont like these sites. I have explained why. I stand by that. To normal non "Critical, stressed, agitated, easily annoyed and aggravated" people, that is called feedback.

Additionally, I dont insult people who have an opinion different to mine. If I did, I might suggest I might not be the one looking like an "asshole".

(BTW, These " " are quotes from the OP, not a weirdo scare thing that as a Brit I don't understand)

Chris, I don't agree, it's you that should be ashamed: Expletives say the most about those who use them, not much about anything else.

Couldn't disagree more. We're all adults here. Expletives add colour and succinctness. Being a dick is the problem.

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Does he do that to the conversation partners, or does he use them just as the stylistic figure? If you know an example of the former, please cite. For the later, it still doesn't represent him particularly favorable, but it's his choice of how he wants to be seen.

Nah.

You're the asshole. I didn't think you were an asshole for falling for marketing gimmickry (because that's what it's for), but combined with the PC nonsense trying to persuade someone to self-censor for having a different opinion than yours..

plus you blamed The Bad Things on coffee.

There is a small nugget of a point somewhere in this guy's assholery, IMO. It is a little strange that just some fancy (perhaps superfluously so) use of web technologies would convert you so easily?

i think saying you "feel like" going out and buying something is not the same as "i will absolutely buy it now without looking into reviews or anything else whereas before i saw the ad i would never have bought it." The first suggests that something moved you emotionally. The other might be more irrational.

Maybe if you make a pretty website he would "feel like" buying some magic beans and eventually decide not to.

personally, i love the scrolling. you get to stop and look at things. in the future, these are going to have much more interaction and exploration. That's the next logical step.

Well, my feeling was the opposite. I was impressed with the execution, but not the content. My first thought when I read "it's about what we make you feel", was that someone at Sony saw this spot by Apple and decided they wanted to do something similar: http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/

They start by saying "we are engineers, but we are also artists", then they spend the rest of the ad creating this separation between engineers and artists, that seems to be common to most electronics companies, like this:

"You don’t wear a TV. You do wear the Personal 3D Viewer. So, we had to rethink our process. We started by designing from the inside out but ended up with a chunky, unwieldy viewer. So we reversed tack and designed the outside first. Only then did we arrange the internal workings and make something desirable to both watch—and wear."

The reality is that Sony has _always_ been focused on how things look and on making things smaller, there are many stories about how their product managers would carry around a wooden replica of the final product as they wanted it to be, challenging the engineers to make it smaller and make it all fit (open up an early MiniDisc player, and you'll see this process at work :).

So this just makes the whole ad look like it's created by a marketing department that doesn't know anything about Sonys history and its design philosophy.

Oh, the ad—and, it seems, the whole publicity message of Hirai-era Sony—is a painfully obvious Apple me-too. Given the brief to deliver that "we ♥ design, too!" message, I think the ad does a pretty good job with the materials available to it. One obvious difference between Sony and Apple is that the former is and has always been* "busy making everything". By pulling together a bunch of diverse, but fairly classy and desirable items from the Sony catalogue the ad helps to mitigate the "consumer-electronics flea market" impression.

The irony is that while Sony chases the Apple halo, Apple's released a couple of ads recently that are highly defensive underneath the sugar-coating. The "Making a difference. One app at a time." videos http://www.apple.com/ios/videos/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOUfzyAEQHk seem intended as a rebuttal to the "lol Angry Birds" dismissal of the iOS App Store, while "Misunderstood" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhwhnEe7CjE is a response to the moral panic about smartphone zombies (and to a lesser extent the "iOS is for consuming, not producing" criticism).

* Well, since maybe the '70s at least.

It makes me wonder why they don't just show a much higher quality and perhaps smaller file size video, and then overlay links etc over the top based on keyframes.

I guess it comes down to fashion and at the moment these animated scroll things are it...

We show lower res while scrolling, load in high-res when stopped. All text, overlays etc are HTML which track frame-by-frame.

Assume all the usual tensions between designers and developers :).

But what's killer feature this offers over a video?

I agree completely. It was pretty and also changed my perception of Sony as a brand, but it was tedious to scroll through and could have been done better.

Jeese this is a tough crowd. I thought it looked great and made the brand look great. Kudos to the designers.

I should clarify that I agree it looked great and was pretty neat. But like Chris said, it was choppy. It took a few too many tries to get it to scroll down from the top of the page. Didn't mean to be a cynic!

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