Finally! It seems that advertisers are taking the hint after last week's Sony-Zipatoni marketing scheme went sour. An article on Advertising Age goes on to cite Sony's fake blog and other previous attempts to drum up business as a lesson on what NOT to do in the industry.

Simply put, the article tells advertisers that the best way to get their ideas across today is to be transparent in your dealings, not only because it makes people want to interact with them more (Microsoft's Major Nelson is a prime example), but because consumers today are a lot smarter and REALLY hate getting deceived.

Hopefully, whoever Sony hires next for their ads will be reading that and taking it to heart. We'd prefer to not make articles that shot, "Sony's making bad ads!" a yearly tradition.

If the denizens of the internet booing at them wasn't enough, the Federal Trade Commission telling viral marketers to fess up probably grabbed their attention. Checking the Zipatoni PSP viral blog, we find a confession and apology (of sorts) from Sony about their doings.

The apology on the "alliwantforxmasisapsp" blog states simply,

Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.

Sony Computer Entertainment America

It's a small triumph for consumers who don't want to end up duped and coerced to buy something. It's also a large triumph for the internet sleuths who uncovered this and let the nets know about it. Best of all, we now get to keep a YouTube video of some guy rapping and dancing for the highlight reels at the end of the year. We wonder if this is going to be a second Three Speech blog for them now, though.

Let's just hope Sony's a whole lot more forthcoming about these kinds of things in the future. We don't want to have to go through this again next December, do we?

Annoyed with the whole business of the Zipatoni PSP-advocating viral blog? Well, we have good news for you. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently took their own stand on the issue of viral marketers, and it's definitely not on the side of the virals.

In a recent edition of the Washington Post, the Commission is quoted as saying that viral marketers should disclose their relationship with the companies they are marketing for. Good news to many people who don't like being deceived by others, and it definitely helps keep us from warning people about another weird Sony advertising plan for their handheld, for instance.

In this day and age though, virals happen often enough, but there are many instances when it seems less like subtle advertising and more like duping people into following a particular opinion, which in this case happens to be the viral marketer's.

In good viral ads, we're amused because the viral either makes it very clear that it's a viral (think of flash games made to advertise a show or a product) or doesn't directly reference the product it's advertising, making it more of a funny Easter egg for fans than an annoyance (The "I Love Bees" Halo campaign). In bad ones, internet sleuths will track your IP down, find out what the deal is, and make sure you're blacklisted among the internet-savvy for offenses to good taste.

With proper implementation by the FTC, we may just see an end to bad rapping and viral graffiti campaigns forever. Of course, whoever was rapping in the PSP viral video we got from YouTube will probably be haunted by the ghosts of really crappy choices till the day he dies.

The internet isn't just for porn these days. It's also a wonderful place to find advertising, as in the case of this new PSP campaign. The above video is from a blog called "alliwantforxmasisapsp," which features two guys trying to spread the word about convincing family members to get one of them a PSP for Christmas. Except, the whole thing's less of a blog than a veiled advertising ploy.

Something Awful forumgoers picked up on this video and its accompanying website, and traced it back to its owners: Zipatoni. It didn't take a very long time for people to figure out that Zipatoni was a marketing company interested in "consumer activation," and in this case, leading others into thinking about making a PSP purchase. We're pretty sure they didn't expect consumers to be active in bashing the site and in spreading the word to every other gaming site out there though.

Much like the PSP graffiti business of 2005, there's something to be said about knowing the boundaries between advertising and lying. Sony also did something similar with the "We're not Sony, but we're close to them" business of the Three Speech blog, which, while informative and actually nifty for grabbing news, is not forthcoming about its actual connections with Sony.

As Aleks Krotoski put it in our source article, "The most important currency online is trust." It doesn't help anyone if we know that, deep inside, you're screaming, "im in ur intarwebz, makin ur viralz!"

Actually, with that kind of lowercase lettering, it'd might be something they could put on their Zipatoni blog.