Playstation Portable graffiti ads? Ingenius

Check out the link to the article from Yahoo! in the title, this is the most original ad campaign ever. The people at Sony are thinking outside of the box.

While mildly illegal this will become something they'll get a ton of press over and if they choose to be law abiding citizens, they'll pay the tiny fines.

Basically what they did was come up with somewhat large stencils of cartoon character kids interacting with Sony's Playstation Portable (PSP) handheld video game system. Some are skateboarding on them or riding them or something like that. The stencils are very basic line art type creations so that you could probably get one on concrete in about 45 seconds with a good can of paint.

The idea that they are doing this type of thing really cool, but for my money I would have gotten on some graffiti websites where the pros hang out and hired some of them in different cities to do it up right. Probably even give them creative control as long as they worked in the product well.

Good graffiti is truly and artform. If you don't believe me do a Google search on it and check out the paintings that are out there. Unreal. How they can put that many hours into a huge painting in a public place without getting arrested is crazy. Some of the trains that come through here have some nice work on them too, but of course there are even more issues with getting into a train yard and starting on a train that won't be there the next day.

I did a little research on it for a headline for a story we did last January after seeing a train with some cool lettering on the cars. I got an idea to create the headline on a local alley's brickwall in a graffiti script and it turned out really well in my opinion. More than one person questioned whether we actually spray painted that wall, but while that would have been awesome, it was only Photoshop.

I hope Sony takes this illegal ad campaign to another level because it's too cool to let die. Even if they have to start finding a way to get permission or whatever. I say do what you have to do.

If I were them I would sell the stencils. Mention on the package that they are meant for kids to decorate their rooms or something like that, and specifically not for public graffiti painting.

You know kids would be out trying to put them up in public. So not only would they be getting the advertising, but the kids and their parents would be paying them to do it through the buying of the stencils.

Now that they have the publicity, this is the logical way to go depending on the public backlash after a few kids get caught.

Actually, the selling of the stencils should be done after commissioning real graffiti artists to do some wild paintings. They are going to paint anyway, so why not pay some of these gifted artists a little coin for their trouble?