Miss Kiss

Sony Walkman -
'Every Moment Has It's Music' 2006

Concepting (online Advertising), Design and Art Direction

Official Honoree - Webby Awards - Best Consumer Electronics Site

See the work below

The brief: To create an online campaign to support the launch of Sony's new MP3 Walkman range.

The challenge: Sony were incredibly late in entering the MP3 player market - by the time they arrived, iPod was in its fourth generation and at the height of its popularity. Apple's iPod communications strategy had quickly catapulted them to market dominance. They weren't the first players in the MP3 market - but they effectively built the category and dominated it at one fell swoop. We had to steal market share. With a limited budget and no above-the-line communication support. Nor could we tap into the heritage of the Walkman brand. To most people, Walkmans were those funky yellow tape players from the eighties, and even though the target market had fond memories of the original units which we could have leveraged, we were given clear instructions not to make any references to the past. Sony's directives were absolute - they wanted to talk about the present.

The idea: Apple had built the category. They had also captured people's imaginations with their art direction style - featuring block colours, black silhouettes, and the white iPod device. We needed to drastically differentiate the Walkman from a visual perspective, not a sound quality argument. To our advantage was Sony's new Organic LED technology, which made the surface of the device glow like coral in the ocean. So, we opted for a more organic feel - a purple Walkman on a purple liquid background. It emerged out of the background of the site like it was rising out of a sea of living plastic. The headphones moved like coral swaying in an ocean current. We also included a "Simple Simon" style memory game, based on the device's interface. A measure of the success of the game can be attributed to the large number of people who tried to hack it. (Not even Rain Man could remember 67 musical notes in order after one listen.)

Results: This microsite received an Honoree award at the Webbys and we also sold out of Walkman A100s. As the design was so well favoured by Sony and it's customers A100 microsite was repurposed for the launch of the new 'Serious About Sound' Gamma MP3 player the following year.