I was making toast one weekend when I caught myself humming an oddly familiar tune. "Hmmmm hmmmm hmmmm hmmmmm, ohhhhh oh whoah oh whoah, hmmmmmm hmmmmm hmmmmm hmmmmmm." I belted out the "oh whoah" part in a soft-yet-gravelly voice—so strange that my wife turned to me and asked, "What the hell are you singing?"
I replied, "Why, it's Shigeru Matsuzaki's iconic Japanese PlayStation Vita commercial from 2012, didn't you recognise it?"
The commercial, released 14 years ago, features the famed singer and voice actor delivering a performance so memorable that I haven’t gone a week without singing it—or at least thinking about it—since. If I hear the word "crooner," if anyone mentions "Katamari Damacy," or if I see or hear anything related to the Vita, this tune immediately comes to mind.
The ad’s brilliance lies in its simplicity: a famous singer sits on a stool, performs for a minute, and Sony tacks on a small Vita overlay at the end. There’s no direct mention of the console, no Vita-branded attire, no gameplay in sight. Yet 14 years later, the commercial still resonates so deeply that it instantly reminds me of a handheld device that stopped production in 2019 and had been fading from relevance long before that.
If that’s not the definition of a Very Good Ad, I don’t know what is.
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