Back in my salad ramen noodle days — and given the state of the economy, those days may be coming back soon — I used to write about how Sony was the most schizophrenic corporation on the planet. Its electronics company tried to produce cool MP3 players, yet Sony Music was so terrified of people downloading MP3s that it forced the electronics group to hobble those MP3 players so much that they became unusable. Sony is a giant octopus with no coordination; no one arm has any clue what any other arm is doing, and the end result is usually mass stupidity.
As you can see from the above video, Sony has applied this to football. EPL Talk spotted that commercial for Sony HDTVs, in which Peyton Manning and friends have a laugh at the mere mention of soccer.
The irony? Sony is a proud corporate sponsor of the UEFA Champions League.
Say, do you think someone might have thought to mention that to the writers and directors of this commercial before allowing it to continue? Especially since Sony seems to be telling a rather large portion of its potential customers to piss off?
Sony’s PR people are trying to spin this as best they can. I wish them luck with that. PR Rep for Sony is an even more thankless job title than Head Coach of the Oakland Raiders.
Of course, what’s equally annoying to me is the Fox Soccer Channel bumper — which hasn’t made it to YouTube yet, for some reason — that features the two donks in NFL jerseys trying to get into an FSC party, only to be rejected because they’re not wearing soccer-related attire. It’s an ad that tells the world that soccer is some exclusive club, and fans of other forms of football are not welcome. Given FSC’s ratings and the current state of soccer in America, they probably shouldn’t be sending that message to anyone. It just serves to remind us, though, that bashing other football codes never goes out of style.
2 responses so far ↓
1 John C. Dvorak // Sep 25, 2008 at 11:38 am
Fox and Sony: dumb and dumber.
Yeah, its stupid but as you point out, this isnt an isolate case.
Its institutional stupidity usually reserved for politicians.
2 a different Dave // Sep 25, 2008 at 8:34 pm
What do you mean, FSC ratings? They will only begin Nielsen ratings for FSC starting October 1st – I suspect that this is because FSC has finally got its viewership up to respectable levels (for a pay-only sports channel). But officially, there are no FSC ratings yet.
Yes, it’s stupid of FSC to imply that soccer is some kind of elite club, but that pales into insignificance compared to the constant soccer bashing in American media, even in media that are supposed to be promoting soccer (like ESPN). This kind of crap ain’t going to fly much longer.