10 Video Game Promotional Tactics That Backfired HORRIBLY

Bad faith advertising followed by companies apologising has become such a commonplace thing in the last decade that it’s easy to get numb to the discourse sometimes. Surely these conglomerates aren’t this stupid? These must be are calculated risks to get people talking about their brand, a damaging day or two on social media be damned.

In the case of PlayStation, surely no one wouldn’t have made this “white is coming” advert without realising what they’ve done.

This image, which adorned billboards in the Netherlands in 2006, was apparently designed to simply promote the upcoming white version of the PlayStation Portable. What it did instead, justifiably, was cause uproar. The domineering pose of a Caucasian woman in all white clutching the terrified face of a woman of colour didn’t seem real.

Sony has a weird track history when it comes to advertising their hardware, usually leaning more into the “totally bizarre” kind of misguided rather than those that can be seen as genuinely divisive.

In a statement they merely clarified that it was part of “100 images created for the campaign have been designed to show this contrast in colours of the PSPs, and have no other message or purpose”.

Weird then, that they wound up pulling the campaign a few days later.