The dog days of PlayStation
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Your support makes all the difference.I love most advertising involving dogs. And cats. I saw the film Cats & Dogs, drawn in by the brilliant highlight advertising. I cherish the memory of the John Smith's bitter (jumping northern mutt version) campaign. The involvement of a real dog or cat doing funny stuff will predispose me to watch the most banal hard-sell/ emotional-hook commercials that I'd otherwise fast-forward.
But the PlayStation 2's "dreaming dog" ad is something else. It certainly involves a dog, and it's riveting, but it's about a completely different set of ideas from the sloshy ads I adore.
Take a kitchen; take a real kitchen with wood-edged, porridge-coloured units circa 1993. Pile it high with stuff like washing-up, food containers – real life-goes-on, night-and-day documentary rubbish, not stylists' propping – and the bottom-of-the-range washing machine roaring away. On the tile-patterned vinyl floor, put a dog centre-stage in the warm half-light. A big old dog sleeping on a sort of plastic cushion. This is a privatised council house. This is a warm womb for weirdness.
At first the dog seems on the dead side, but as the washer moans on it starts moving – involuntary movements in its big old front legs, with its big old nails making a clattering noise on the vinyl. These little jerks spread to the back legs, and you're gearing up for broad farce – cartwheels, vertical take-off, something from a software kit.
Practically everyone's had a dreaming dog – the first sleeping face you studied. And this ad, subtle and spooky, is much closer to that. Meaning our dog stops thrashing and makes a surprised little moany sound, like dreaming dogs and people do. No vulgar effects. Instead we're transferred to that near-death corridor we all know exists just beyond domestic banality, facing a door framed in blue light. Visit your third place, says PlayStation (and I thought it was Starbucks).
This is a Spielberg theme but executed in a Damien Hirst kind of way. The kitchen art direction, the dog jerking like something on a slab fired by electrodes, is nearer neuroscience than Narnia. Never underestimate the power of PlayStation, they always said, and this impressively worrying bit of new sensibility makes you think they might be right.
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