#if you've got any information on any of these ads/the veracity of them please prove me wrong!

[astrobstrd]

So I hate to be the person who goes on some long winded reply to offhanded comments on a Tumblr post but this phenomenon and the self-satisfied Only A Dipshit Would Fall For This attitude has been bugging the hell out of me since I saw it. I absolutely felt like some of these were fake, but I've seen some of these go around for years as if they were real. Trying to actually find any of this out? Kind of a pain in the ass! A lot of clickbait articles, lame r/gaming threads and tweets that lead largely nowhere. Tried my best, and this is what I've got:

1st image: ❌ This one has been regurgitated everywhere. Reposts on Reddit, Twitter, fucking eBaumsworld, and other sites with attention grabbing headlines like Twelve Playstation Ads That Wouldn't Fly Today And Will Fucking Blow Your Mind! It's a fake photoshoot done by @notshysmith on Twitter back in 2021. It's convincing enough, and I've gotta say it's a cool set of pics, but it is a fake.

2nd image: ✔️ I am pretty much 100% certain this is real. The anecdotal evidence of "I swear I saw this as a kid!!" gets less and less valid every day, but I really do remember seeing this one in magazines when I was younger. And to support that: here's a link to a (sort of dubious) ad archiving website that surfaces the market said ads were served to, names of copywriters, art directors, ad agencies responsible and so on. It points to the names of a few people whom show up in other places attributed to advertising, sometimes even the same ad or similar ones. While they don't show up a ton on Google, Jorge Carreño and Eric Helias are the art director and copywriter involved in a few Playstation 2 ads from the time, despite not explicitly being listed in some of the aforementioned links, and TBWA is a legitimate ad agency in Paris that's still active. Here's a link to Behance that links both the "Sleepless Nights" ad and the "Realism" heart ad back. Could this be a case of misattribution? I can't rule it out 100%, but I wholeheartedly doubt it.

3rd image: ✔️ Surprisingly to me, this one also appears to be real. Here's a link to another ad archiving site with proper attribution. Another TBWA joint, the art direction is attributed to a one Christian Finucane, who you can google and find his very real IG page, as well as other print ads he did for Sony at the time. Jon Skinner was the copywriter and also, as far as I can tell, has worked in the Australian ad biz for a long while. Seems pretty real to me

4th image: ❌ I couldn't for the life of me find any attribution or credit for this one outside of random Twitter posts, from which some even repeat the claim that the 8th image here is a fake. UNTIL I found a link to another tweet with the unedited image of Devon Aoki that claims to be for a beauty & lifestyle magazine named Jalouse. Jalouse, as far as I can tell, is a smaller French publication for which this photo was done, and it was then mocked up as a fake PS2 ad by... someone. Here's an eBay listing for the issue this shoot was done for.

The slogan "whenever, wherever, forever" was actually used by Sony in the past, just for the record.

5th image: ✔️ Again, I really do think this one is real, but I'm iffier on it. There's an AdsSpot listing for it that links the work back to Christian Finucane, Jon Skinner, and Whybin\TBWA. Jon Bader is also listed as the photographer, who is a Sydney-based photographer with a pretty extensive advertising portfolio. This ad is absent, but I really only think this portfolio goes back only so far. I do genuinely think this is real, but can't provide sufficiently convincing evidence outside of one AdsSpot page. If anyone who might see this has confirmation or can tell me it's bullshit, let me know.

6th image: ✔️ A little more confident on this one. The same wordpress blog I linked in the second image's description cites this as an ad just named RUBIK, and links to other similarly dark and grungy ads of the same campaign. The ads are tied to BBDO Chile, an advertising agency in Chile that returns credible hits upon Googling. Joaquin Bascunan and Cristian Schinadeerman, (no really valuable hits for this name,) were both creative directors on this one and I also don't really have any reason to doubt the veracity of this one.

So, here's the part where I have to tackle some things I've had doubts on while figuring all this out: Adforum, who I've cited and been thumbing through for a lot of verifying information, is also a site whose legitimacy I struggled to confirm at first. The wikipedia article for it is currently tagged as "[containing content] that is written like an advertisement," and ultimately feels slapdash. The credits on certain pieces are freely available, while some of the more dubious pieces I've researched have them locked behind a subscription fee. Hervé de Clerck, its founder, has a relatively recently updated Twitter and Linkedin profile, a YouTube video I was able to track down where he spoke about responsibility in advertising, and Adforum has Wayback machine screenshots dating back to 2000. It seems like this is an above-board site that is employing a really shitty business model that, either purposefully or not, obfuscates information about ads. It muddies this whole process in a way that is incredibly frustrating and makes me doubt, really, any information I see on the internet even further.

AdsSpot is even harder to discern, but they seem to be an arm of LiveAD, a Brazilian ad agency. (Reference 7 in this Wiki article links back to an AdsSpot hit which seems to imply ownership or involvement.) Once again, they ALSO lock full credits for most of their ads behind a subscription fee.

But, both sites have lead me to ostensibly real people who've worked in advertising, copywriting and photography who I have no reason to suspect are made up for the sake of fluffing a fake ad agency's website or to spread misinformation on what is ultimately a niche topic. There's still, however, this doubt that runs through me on every search I make regarding this topic now. Old video game print ads aren't a completely ignored form of 'lost media,' but they're definitely not as well archived as they could be, and there's so little clear information on a lot of these more "controversial" ads. I think for the ones I've claimed to have pretty strong confidence in being real are just cases of poor archival, unclear attribution, or both. I realize there's some hypocrisy in continuing to just go about testing the rest of these images, but I feel like I kind of have to now. I'm this fucking deep!

7th image: ✔️ As I linked in the 2nd image's description, here's that same Behance posting linked directly to Jose Carreno on this one. For whatever reason, the caption/title of the piece in the upper left has been wiped from this one, and some color correction's been done on it here, but again, I don't have any reason to doubt this one. I'm saying legit until proven otherwise.

8th image: ❌ Same as the 4th image. This is a photo of Naomi Campbell for a different publication that's been done up with a faux PS2 ad style. Definitely faked. REALLY cool pieces of art though.

Jesus christ I swear I didn't mean for this post to be this long but I really got it in me that I wouldn't half-ass this and found it really interesting to trace all this shit back as far as I could. Video game ads, like literally all advertising, have always been "mass market weird" and provocative to varying degrees and I don't think it's hard to believe that old shit like this is real. I mean, yes, David Lynch did in fact produce commercials for Sony. No, he did not do every weird PS2 ad you saw. No, I still don't know if these fucking panty sniffing French PS2 ads are real but I really wouldn't rule it out. Maybe I'll figure that one out some other time

Vintage PlayStation 2 ads

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