Zipatoni

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This article has been tagged since December 2006

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Zipatoni is an American marketing company that provides clients "zany" and "off-beat" marketing services, mainly through buzz marketing or viral marketing.

[edit] Controversy Surrounding Viral Marketing

Sometime in late 2006, Zipatoni was hired by Sony Computer Entertainment America, the makers of the Playstation platforms, to conduct a viral ad campaign known as "All I want for Christmas is a PSP." The campaign stars three young Americans -- Charlie, J, and Pete, performing zany antics such as rapping poorly in an attempt to receive a PSP for Christmas. The distribution of the campaign was done through YouTube and a blog, alliwantforxmasisapsp.com. The blog featured a poorly written introduction that explained the supposed mission of the three friends in attempted Internet slang :

i (charlie) have a psp. my friend jeremy does not. but he wants one this year for xmas.
so we started clowning with sum not-so-subtle hints to j's parents that a psp would be teh perfect gift. we created this site to spread the luv to those like j who want a psp!
consider us your own personal psp hype machine, here to help you wage a holiday assault on ur parents, girl, granny, boss – whoever – so they know what you really want.
we'll let you know how it works for us. pls return the favor.
more to come,
c&j.

The campaign blew up across the Internet in December, 2006, though not in the way Zipatoni might have liked. The video on YouTube was linked through numerous forums and sites popular in the gaming community, such as SomethingAwful.com, Joystiq.com, PSPFanboy.com, and IGN.com. All the sites generally mocked the campaign, and Something Awful discovered the Sony and Zipatoni connection.

Noticeable faults had been made by Zipatoni in its guerilla campaign, including registering the domain alliwantforxmasisapsp.com to The Zipatoni Co. (visible through a simple WHOIS), and using the same man to model both as a friend of Charlie and J, and as a marketing consultant on the Zipatoni homepage. [1] Also, the words "Zipatoni" and "Viral" were banned from being posted in the comments section of the blog, immediately confirming suspicions.

[edit] External links

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