Sony

"Tough as Sony"

The Sony Broadcast Tape Division had high-quality video tape designed specifically for professional TV studio applications — news programs, commercial spots, local shows but it wasn't selling very well. Apart from the top three cities in the country, nearly every station and affiliate insisted on using the same brand of tape they'd always used — 3M.

We worked with Sony sales and marketing people to get to something unique that we could use as the cornerstone of a campaign. But it seemed all we kept hearing was, it's really good tape. And that wasn't going to cut it as a campaign.

Finally, the product manager came up with "durability." We probed on that — why would the studios care, what makes that important, what's the benefit — and then we got to the nub. Every single studio re-uses tapes, over and over again. Lesser tapes can't take it. They stretch, they lose their magnetic particles and anything recorded on them looks terrible.

Our hook was exceptional durability for all that "jog and shuttle" that every studio expects its tape to stand up to. Now we had to make it compelling.

We kept coming back to "tough as nails" as the opening for the campaign — we were going to create the solid impression that this was the toughest tape out there.

Then it hit us — reverse the cliché. Instead of Sony being tough as nails, we made nails tough as Sony. That's how the campaign was born, and that's how Sony Broadcast Tape sales went through the roof