Bringing a brand character to life

The video game industry has undergone huge expansion in recent years. With consumers spending $24.75 billion on games and gaming hardware in 2011 (ESA), it's clear that the industry has become a highly successful mainstream form of media. However, this explosion has not come without more than a few growing pains, including those in the area of advertising. Companies struggled to advertise in a way that catered not only to their established "hardcore" fans, but also to broaden their audience and find mass appeal.

Sony, one of the Console Wars giants, is now in its third generation of the Playstation. The PS3, as it has come to be known, had the unfortunate opportunity to follow up the best selling console of all time, the Playstation 2. In fact, the PS3 was met with widespread disappointment from launch, and if not for "Red Ring of Death" hardware failures in the Xbox 360 consoles the PS3 may have been a complete disaster from a PR standpoint.

Coming off of and underwhelming, strange, and irrelevant "White Room" campaign, Sony decided it was time for a change. Senior VP of Marketing, Peter Dille, stated in a blog post that they wanted to move toward "a more high-energy, entertainment driven focus for the PS3." The result of this is the creation of Kevin Butler, Sony's fake vice president whose department changed with just about every ad.  

Meet Kevin Butler, Sony's VP of almost anything.

Butler appears as a lighthearted, energetic, and down-to-earth kind of executive. Seen without a jacket, usually with sleeves rolled back, he appears to the audience as the kind of guy that's accessible and entertaining. To me, this was a fantastic move for a company that needed to change the way people think about it and its product. After all, what better way to get the audience to understand your brand character than to actually create him as a real character?

Not only was the campaign successful in this respect, but the commercials are also created as if Butler is responding to fan questions, and in the process I think they manage to convey important information about the PS3 and some of the top-name games for it. After a while, Kevin Butler even transformed into something of a cult figure in the world of gaming, and his commercials remain some of the most funny and memorable in the history of the industry.

Be sure to check out one of the most successful examples of the Kevin Butler "It only does everything" campaign below!