Sony has a bit of an odd history with advertising. From David Lynch oddities to a girl with a weird head, the nonsensical tomfoolery has always been excusable, due to the PlayStation brand’s dominance over the videogames market. Those days, however, have now come to an end.

Marketing, as a tool, has never been more important in videogames than it is now. By creating the most obvious, mainstream-attracting TV ad campaigns, Nintendo has run rings around Sony’s ‘This Is Living’ efforts. Parents, children and the elderly have suddenly awoken to this ‘new’ gaming revolution, willing or not – it was very clever of Nintendo, and it now has a revived marketshare, as a result.

Sony’s equivalent has been baffling and misfiring. To create the This Is Living campaign, which has so far centred around poodles, women on the toilet and dancers with huge noses, Sony enlisted the help of ad agency giant TBWA, responsible for the ‘silhouette’ iPod adverts and Peter Kay’s John Smith shorts. The PlayStation 3 campaign, however, is obviously where the company has hit a creative stumbling block.

The This Is Living campaign feels as if it was fashioned by people that don’t play PlayStation games, or somehow misunderstand their appeal. In contrast to their award-winning iPod adverts, which are clearly focused on the music, TBWA has taken the PlayStation 3 away from the importance of its games. In addition to this, the PS3’s capabilities are barely hinted at by the campaign, which itself is a mismatch of self-indulgent ‘characters’, as well as an overbearingly quirky tone. This Is Living, though, is a decent slogan, so we’re hopeful that it aligns it with a more meaningful strategy in the future.

To be fair, though, Sony was probably pushing uniqueness to the fore when it was outsourced to TBWA. We attempted to grill Sony on its This Is Living campaign, but the response was brief. According to Adam Boita, UK marketing manager at Sony, “All of the ads, be it software or hardware, aim to educate consumers on how the key technologies behind PlayStation 3 allow us to deliver high-definition entertainment like you’ve never seen before.” Typical PR spiel, then, but at least Sony responded.

One of the Sony tactics we do appreciate is the PlayStation Tour, which is more of a grassroots way of marketing the system. Boita explains its meaning, “The PlayStation 3 UK Tour has allowed people to experience and learn more about the capabilities of PlayStation 3 at train stations, shopping centres, universities and most recently at the O2.” This has been widely acknowledged as a success – 90,000 people turned up for the Tour’s December denouement at the O2 arena, which housed a SingStar installation as a centerpiece. Sony’s Christmas campaign, which earmarked £1 million for This Is Living quirkiness, and £3 million for straightforward game adverts, was also quite effective.

Although we didn’t like Ratchet & Clank: Tools Of Destruction, we’ll admit that its adverts were rather good. With Captain Quark talking over the footage, it did a good job of presenting the title as the gaming equivalent of a Pixar movie. Even though the title had a fairly small impact, in terms of sales (21 on Chart Track’s Top 40, in its first week), the adverts were linear and to the point. The only other method of marketing Ratchet & Clank would have been to imitate Nintendo, and show a range of people having a fun time with the game. The Uncharted adverts followed a similar tack to Ratchet & Clank, and were as effective – the game sold 550,000 in Europe, according to VGchartz.com. This is higher than any other region.

Slightly less successful were the SingStar ‘karaoke’ adverts, which shied away from what the game was about. Surely the SingStore capabilities were impressive enough to warrant some mention, without any sort of gimmick? We were hoping for a more linear, focused look at the game’s key features – video sharing and extra tracks, for example – but there was barely any reference to this. It wasn’t a disaster, but more thought could’ve gone into it.

Overall, we were fairly impressed by Sony’s efforts over the last few months of 2007. The danger now, though, is for the company to be complacent, while Nintendo steamrollers over it with its everyman-grabbing, marketing juggernaut. Now, the PS3 hardware, more than anything, needs to be highlighted for the potential user base. The frivolous This Is Living campaign just doesn’t cut it.

With 2008 in full swing, we hope Sony has sensed that illustrating a game’s quality is the way forward. Sure, there’s room for creativity, but there’s a lot more of the PS3’s basic functions that will impress the public. What about Blu-ray movies, the PS Store or the free Network access? Games like Killzone 2 and Gran Turismo 5 will sell themselves in 2008, but the PS3 will not.