Graffiti Ads

BizReport.com: The images are painted directly onto building walls in urban areas, graffiti-style. Wide-eyed kids, portrayed in a stylized, comic-book rendering, pose with a mysterious, hand-size gadget. One licks his like a lollipop. Another is playing paddleball with the thing.
What looks like artful vandalism, though, is really part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for Sony’s PlayStation Portable, a device that can play games, music and movies.
In major cities such as San Francisco, Miami and New York, Sony has paid building owners to use wall space for the campaign, and the images have become a familiar sight. It’s the latest effort by a big corporation to capitalize on the hot world of street art to reach an urban market that has learned to tune out traditional advertising.
Nike Inc., Time magazine and even stodgy International Business Machines Corp. are among the growing list of companies that have dabbled in street art to get their marketing messages out.
The trend makes some artists squeamish even as others start marketing firms or open galleries. In Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, cell phone maker Nokia Corp. used sidewalk chalk drawings to promote its N-Gage, a cell phone aimed at gamers, when it launched the product in 2003.
What Looks Like Graffiti Could Really Be an Ad [BizReport.com]