Sony plans to push Memory Stick and iLink IEEE-1394 connectivity at this week’s Comdex show and will take its message to the rest of the country via a comprehensive television and print advertising campaign, which highlights key products that can share the systems.
Immediately prior to the show, Sony revealed a network television ad campaign that combines the Vaio PC products and Digital 8 Handycam camcorders. Both categories can be interconnected with iLink bi-directional cabling, and certain D8 camcorders use Memory Stick flash memory clips to capture and store digital still images.
Memory Stick readers connected to Vaio PCs can read and transfer image files from Memory Stick to hard disk drives, where they can be archived, adjusted with photo-manipulation software, or copied and e-mailed.
“We are using our national television campaign to try to inform and educate people to the benefits of Vaio PCs and Digital 8 camcorders,” said Mark Viken, Sony Electronics digital imaging marketing division senior VP. “We want to show how when you connect them together with iLink you get a whole new way of enjoying these products with a nonlinear editing feature.”
The TV spots will run November 6 through most of January, showing Sony products that work seamlessly together.
The campaign will include 30- and 60-second spots on ESPN and CBS college football games. It will extend to mid-December using NFL and ESPN spots, and shows on USA, TNT, TBS and many other cable networks.
Images from the 30- and 60-second ads will be featured in a direct link to Sony’s Web site, from November to December so viewers can access additional information on Sony Vaio PC products and Digital Handycams.
The Web site also gives viewers the choice of purchasing Sony’s products online through Sony Vaio Direct or locating the nearest Sony retailer.
Sony will offer several retail tie-ins to the ad campaign, including a “Connect and Create” rebate campaign that offers purchasers $100 if they buy both a Vaio PC and a Sony Digital camcorder within 60 days of each other. Sony also offers a “digital imaging retail display” that plays up iLink, nonlinear editing, Memory Stick and Personal Networking.
In December, Sony will launch “a major national print campaign” employing a four-page Memory Stick ad folio, at the end of which consumers are invited to visit the Memory Stick Web site to learn more about the products, technology and Sony’s vision of personal networking. It is tentatively slated to run through April in national publications.
