Sony Ericsson falls off cluetrain in marketing the W800

You know, one of the many great things about the internet is the new transparency in which marketers are actually speaking openly and honestly with their companies' customers instead of trying to hoodwink them into buying products. We think perhaps Sony Ericsson hasn't heard about any of that, because apparently they mounted an entirely fabricated marketing campaign to get users to submit testimonials about the W800 Walkman phone. This involved concocting a story about dance producer DJ Laurent Wolf losing his W800 at a club, which contained the only copy of his next single. We're wondering a) why anybody bought the idea of a well-known producer leaving the only copy of a work in progress on a cellphone, b) how the testimonials were supposed to help find the phone, and c) why Sony Ericsson didn't just ask people up front to submit testimonials for what is plainly a pretty righteous phone in its own right.

[Cyberwhore @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

I would have like to have read the linked story but unfortunately for me I dont understand French.

[zoara @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Try babelfish.altavista.com, translates enough to get the gist of the article

[Blanche @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

I'm in Amsterdam and played w/this phone at Orange. Sweet!

[Sylvain @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

I'll try to translate this for DJing.com

[Sylvain @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Now in english :)
http://www.djing.com/news/news-1641-laurent-wolf-a-famous-parisian-nightclub-and-sony-set-up-a-trickery-to-promote-w800.html

[popeye cahn @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

It's very concievable that the only copy (as in a copy not the only copy extent..) was on that phone, recall U2 losing a CD copy of their last album at a video shoot. I think the story is a tad streched but feasible.

BTW, does this phone only come in goofy, 1998 iMac orange?!

[Sylvain @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

FYI blog was created on August 22nd, 2 weeks before the lost

[JonesH @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

well, yeah, it's quite impossible that a musician would only have one copy of his next hit... or perhaps if his studio exploded, that is a possibility. Yeah, that's gotta be it.

[Pacey @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

I did enough production work to say that if someone had the only copy of their work on their PHONE then they deserve to loose it. If that truely was your livelyhood, you would have at least on copy on the hard drive in the studio, one on CD, possibly one on MD (they work great for productions still), maybe one on the phone, and if you work at home like I did, one there too.

Marketing people need to actually think before they throw something stupid out there.

[Jon @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Sony recently got done in the courts for fabricating review quotes for their films so this is no surprise.
It's surprising how big companies have no capacity for learning from their past mistakes.

[Finished.Law.School @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Sony did the exact same thing with their movies. Doing this with their phones is by no means a stretch for them at all.

[brian debaser @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Who is Laurent Wolf? Did they make that up or mean Laurent Garnier?

[Graham @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

coming from a sound engineer standpoint, I can tell you that that story is completely fake because I seriously doubt a DJ will record onto analog tape thus meaning they use some form of digital device... for the song to be on the phone it has to be in digital format as well. Also, most songs are multitracked and if he had exported a demo he'd still have the rest on his computer, also people back things up many times, and finally any musician in their right mind would not make their demo an .mp3 because the quality is terrible compared to an uncompressed .aiff or .wav format. Though true idiocy could create a scenario like that, I doubt a working professional would make such a mistake.

[Sylvain @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

No Laurent Wolf is a DJ only known in France and Belgium that produces commercial dance music. you don't need to kwow him :)