So, in randomly surfing, I found this video on YouTube.

It totally bashes the PS3 – in a very creative and entertaining manner I might say.

However in watching it, I couldn’t help wondering if this video was actually some guerilla negative marketing on the part of Microsoft?  On the face of it, this video looks like it was produced by a hardcore gamer, who cares enough about console religious wars, actually spend the time to build this video. However several things stood out that just didn’t fit:

  • The production values were too high. This just didn’t look like the product of a fanactical teenager who put this together overnight on his MAC or, more likely Alienware rig.
  • The backing track wasn’t just some cheap cover version of the Fray’s ‘How to Save a Life’ – it was the backing track to that song.
  • Ditto for the lyrics which were very catchy, very well written – too well written
  • The graphs intermittantly shown in video were well put together, very professional and featured some pretty obscure/proprietary stats.  They looked like slides from some gaming exec’s powerpoint deck.
  • The messaging points in the video – the importance of online gaming, cool exclusive games and the message that ‘no one cares about BluRay’ – (not true, if I get a BlueRay player, it probably will be a PS3) all play to the XBox360’s strengths and PS3 weaknesses.
  • Though the video does reference the Wii, the references to the 360 are much more numerous.  In fact the video ends with a cut to the XBox360 logo – this is a dead giveaway and more than anything else in the video raised my suspicions.
  • When I looked at the other videos posted by the user on youtube, all he had were XBox360 games.
  • Just the name of video ‘How To Killed Your BRAND’? – raises eyebrows.  What hardcore gamers do you know think/care enough about brand equity to create a video? The only gamers I can think of are Microsoft XBox 360 marketers.
  • Similarly the video raises the point about relative costs being an issue?  But seriously, what hard core gamer do you know that are really price conscious?  I know some gamers that literally have all of XBox360, PS3 and Wii sitting on their TV stands.  Clearly cost wasn’t an issue for them.

So having laid out the case this is a Microsoft-produced video (good to see the evil empire hasn’t lost its touch), I guess there are two possible explanations:

  1. Either this was some internal video a Redmond employee put together to show some company rally that was overzealously posted to YouTube
  2. this was intentionally produced by the evil empire as part of a guerilla negative marketing strategy.

Maybe I give them too much credit but I think it’s the latter. 

Well, give the boys in Redmond props for being creative in their marketing efforts.  They’ve taken the concept of SwiftBoat Veterans and adapted it to consumer marketing.

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