Sony has been hailed for their imaginative advertising for Bravia their line of high-definition LCD televisions. Since the launch of that stream of 50,000 colorful balls bouncing down a San Francisco street to their latest, bold colored dominoes tumbling through India, here is a look at all of those colorful commercials.
Dominos
This advertising campaign was launched in October 2008. Shot on location in India’s states of Rajastan and Uttar Pradesh. The 60 second Dominoes video takes viewers on a journey on a tumbling journey of color, from a magnificent fort in Jaisalmer through a desert all the way to the Taj Mahal in Agra. The music for the spot was created by Song Zu and Darker My Love’s Rob Barbato.
Pyramid
The advert, filmed in Egypt features thousands of coloured cotton reels tumbling down a pyramid.
India
Advertisement in India features thousands of square anthropomorphic pixels. A Kathakali dancer’s green face turns into pixels which run away from him. He finds his face later in a Sony BRAVIA television.
Play-Doh (Rabbit)
The accompanying soundtrack is ‘She’s a Rainbow’ by the Rolling Stones. The commercial was filmed in New York City´s places.
Paint
Following on from the original advert, Jonathan Glazer directed the second in which a tower block in Toryglen in Glasgow, Scotland was covered in 70,000 litres of environmentally friendly paint with the help of over 1400 separate explosions featured as imitation fireworks. This was filmed with a crew of 250 people over a 10 day period in July 2006.
Launch, ‘Balls’
The launch of the BRAVIA brand was supported by an advertising campaign featuring 250,000 brightly-colored rubber balls (real, not computer-generated) bouncing down a San Francisco street. The advertisement was made by former Danish photographer Nicolai Fuglsig. The idea was originally a segment of The Late Show with David Letterman in 1996, in which bouncy balls rolled down the same street. Fallon, the advertising agency involved with the commercial, denied ever having watched the episode and claimed the similarity was a coincidence. Their idea was brought to life by director Nicolai Fuglsig with the help of Los Angeles-based special effects guru Barry Conner. In addition to the 12 air mortars, Conner deployed three giant skips, each lifted 50 feet into the air and containing 35,000 coloured bouncy balls.
The first shot required 50,000 balls to be sent cascading down a hill, colliding at a road junction with a further 50,000 that had been fired along a side street. A team of 50 interns was on hand to gather up the balls for the six takes it took over four days. Golf nets were erected at the sides of the street and every drain was blocked.
Parodies
A parody of this advert was run in the UK by Tango, a brand of soft drink. The advert was filmed in Swansea, Wales and featured fruit in place of bouncing balls.
Circulating only throughout the internet, a video filmed by a clan features 64 players simultaneously hopping down a slope and over Humvees on the Sharqi Peninsula, a map in Battlefield 2. Instead of “BRAVIA – Colour like no other” at the end of the original Bouncy Balls commercial, the clan’s video read “Bunny hopping – Like no other”.
On Belgian television, channel VT4 showed a commercial for a soccer event, using soccer balls and the same music as the Sony commercial.
At the Game Developers Conference of 2008, video game developer Crytek reproduced the commercial to demonstrate its CryEngine 2 game engine. Instead of multi-colored bouncy balls, Crytek used bouncing teapots. At the end of the demonstration, the video reads “Realtime – Like no other.”
Siana, a World of Warcraft player on the Kazzak(EU)realm made a parody replacing the bouncing balls with gnomes jumping down the Ironforge hill. The video ends with all the gnomes formed like a heart around Siana and the text “Gnomes – like no other” is shown. The video then fades off, and the World of Warcraft logo is shown.
