Adorable parents. Adorable kid. Peppy music. But Anna, why are you in a record store when you could be jamming out to music on you Windows Phone 7 Series? And who are those other kids you're showing pictures of to your friend? And why can't dad put his phone down for two seconds to play soccer with poor Luca? And what kind of weird torture porn date night movie is this?

You want me to meet Anna, Microsoft? Fine. I'll play your game. But know that I'm proceeding with extreme caution. [MobileCrunch]

Slate's got a very fun roundup of the faces behind some of the most famous hands in advertising. The grip in the above Kindle ad, for instance, belongs to the lovely Mia Crowe:

See? No fair! Totally ruins my preconception that all hand models look like George Costanza. The universe just seemed more balanced that way.

Also featured: the guy whose finger presses the Staples Easy Button, and the only body double Megan Fox would ever need. [Slate]

Back when Sony had only electronics to sell, they sold them like no other—to borrow a more sensible slogan that the company recently retired. You bought a Trinitron TV because it was the best, you bought a Walkman because it was the coolest, and you told everyone else they were dumb if they didn't do the same. "It's a Sony!" you'd shout at any half-witted amigo who was reluctant to pay the Sony premium.

Sony worked hard to make you a part of its marketing team. They even went so far as to indoctrinate the children. When the My First Sony line was launched, it actually made sense, because it reinforced what you already believed: that you would buy in and keep on buying. Brand did matter, but only by standing for specific, high-quality products. There were 170 different Walkman models released during its first decade, sure, but this was before MP3 players, cellphones, PDAs, laptops, portable game consoles and pocket-sized camcorders. Besides perhaps a 35mm compact camera, this was the only portable gadget to buy. You knew you were getting it, so choosing which one became a connoisseur's dilemma. Even gorillas knew this.

By the time Sony got into the movie and record business, and the iconic cassette Walkman gave way to the less iconic CD Walkman, the Sony brand became bigger than the gadgets. With the eventual exception of PlayStation, the electronics lost their own identities. That's not to say the gadget well dried up. On the contrary, Sony released more and more, jazzing up tried-and-true businesses with progressive industrial design and catchy-sounding sub-brands. It's not a clock radio, it's a Dream Machine. Sony's brand momentum carried it successfully into new areas where they really could make a superior product. In addition to the videogame consoles, this included digital cameras, portable computers and dog-shaped robots.

But due to arrogance, an obsession with proprietary formats and a lack of stick-to-itiveness—coinciding with the rise of unexpectedly tough competition from Korea, China and Cupertino, California—the magic wore off. The "buy the brand" message lost its grip on shoppers, but to the increasingly out-of-touch executives inside the company, it seems to have become a rallying cry.

Sony started losing Number 1 positions in TVs, cameras and even videogame consoles, and found themselves unable to get the market leadership they assumed they'd easily grab in other areas, such as PCs or ebook readers. As they slipped, their advertising just got weirder and weirder. Ads now ranged from purely artistic—products saw hardly any airtime—to trippy—products were shown, but not in a way that a buyer could relate to—to sarcastic—where pitchmen and pitchwomen spouted nonsense and openly mocked customers, as if consciously parodying Sony's own classic advertisements.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, we can see how all three of these categories failed to hit their targets.

Artsy Fartsy

What can you say about this category, except that who doesn't like rainbow-colored Claymation bunnies hopping to late-'60s Rolling Stones?

Who doesn't like bubbles falling from the sky? Or the spontaneous proliferation of several million bouncy balls? Who among you doesn't like sound/vision experiments by avant garde directors cut to ADHD-friendly 3-minute lengths?

If you answered "no" to the above questions, you are lying. But to drive the point of failure home, let's hear from one of YouTube's commenters: "It's visually interesting but it comes across as some kind of dystopian vision of the future. An Orwellian kind of hell sponsored by Sony." Hell. By Sony. And I am not entirely sure I ever saw anything I could actually buy.

But Will It Bite?

Another batch of ads featured real Sony products, but not in any way that helped the consumer decision. We begin with the PlayStation 3, according to this video, a dangerous, volatile and ugly beast that does… something:

Somehow they manage to convey all the tension of gaming without any of the fun. It's violent through and through, except for that quick bit with the butterflies.

Here is the Bloggie camcorder, whose simple demonstration has been so perverted, it would cause Steve Jobs—or even Steve Ballmer—to shoot the director between the eyes:

Never mind that, on this complicated-looking copy of a Flip camera, the 270º swivel lens is the only thing everyone would figure out immediately, why does the product have to be man-sized? And what's with the fingers guy?

In this whole mess, the most organic ad I could find was for Rolly, the short-lived zany Bluetooth music robot. I love the ad, but I actually know the product. The ad, to a lay person, would be confusing at best, and at worst would suggest a degree of interactivity that the product simply didn't have:

F*** You, Buy a Sony

The ads that Sony should really be ashamed of, though, are the so-called expert ads, some of which ran on our own site this past holiday season. I will admit to being a fan of Peyton Manning and Justin Timberlake, but they're not experts, and I wouldn't trust them any more than I trust any of the other people on the so-called panel.

In the Sony Reader ad, when the poor actress has to ask the incredibly dumb question "Can I read a lot of books on this thing?" Amy Sedaris says yes and holds up her book, I Like You. It's worth noting that unlike her brother's works, Amy's book is highly visual, with color photos and lots of sight gags. It's excellent, but you would never ever read it on a Sony Reader—or on a Kindle.

In the camera ad, when the actress mentions that all the cameras look the same, baby-seal photographer Nigel Barker explains that "the technology in their cameras and camcorders makes it easy to get the best shot." This is something every camera maker would say about their cameras. It doesn't differentiate, and it can never be proven wrong.

During the TV ad, Peyton and Justin play pingpong. ESPN's Erin Andrews says to a bewildered family, "You can't fake Sony quality." Justin chimes in with, "The more sports you watch on a Sony, the better you get. At sports." And then a TV appears with the words HDNA scrawled across it, though the announcer says it's called a Bravia. I don't know what HDNA is, and I was there when they unveiled it.

In a rather ironic twist, these ads got remix treatment by the Gregory Brothers of Auto-tune the News fame. This isn't some Gray Album bootleg, but a viral video sanctioned by Sony's marketing department, an approval that shows Sony can make some daring choices when they want to. But was it the right move? I enjoy this remix more than any of the original ads, but it doesn't clear up any frustration either. It is a distortion of a distortion of a message.

Don't you feel like the Gregory Brothers know this? They openly mock the customers, and they repeat "these all seem the same" over and over—and over. I couldn't help but flash a knowing smile when Julia Allison explains that the Sony PC is different because it has a Blu-ray drive and an HD screen. Like every other Windows laptop in that range.

Where Do They Go From Here?

When criticizing advertising, the easiest thing to do is to point to Apple as the counter example. "Well, Apple would've done it this way." But truthfully, Apple achieves what most companies strive to pull off, an entertaining but earnest look at the product being sold, or a comedic vignette that drives a single sales point home. (Say what you want about Justin Long, but Hodgman's Eeyore of a PC sure sells Macs.) Like everything else, Sony needs to focus. Instead of hiring 20 different artists to conceive of crazy shit, why not create a global ad campaign that focuses on specific actual products, and portrays their standout features in a way that doesn't sound like it's mocking the products or the customers? My only fear is that as Sony has less and less to brag about, this strategy will be harder to work out. Still, it's worth a shot: Pick your best products, get closeup shots, play some baby music in the background, and tell us why we should buy them. No psychedelia, no anthropomorphic gimmicks, and no smirking.

The complete "We Miss Sony" series
• Video: Describe Sony In A Word
• How Sony Lost Its Way
• Sony's Engineer Brothers
• Infographic: Sony's Overwhelming Gadget Line-Up
• The Sony Timeline: Birth, Rise, and Decadence
• Let's Make.Believe Sony's Ads Make Sense
• The Return of Sony

[Lead image]

This six-year-old patent contains details like finding where you are, adjusting the content of an ad, how (and how much) advertisers will pay for it and various other advertisery components. Obviously serving up ads to your phone depending on where you currently are will be a huge deal in the years to come, and now Google might be able to lock other people out from doing similar things. You know, like Apple, if Apple decides to sue Google for violating any of Apple's patents in Android. [Venturebeat]

I'm not saying it's bad or uncool, other than we all have it stuck in our heads from the repetition. Just that it sounds like, well, the kind of music you play for a baby so they fall asleep. Dreaming of Apple ads.

Stylish Stylus
We got a look at Samsung's ebook readers—the E6 and the E101—back at CES, but now you can check them out on video. Their claim to fame: electromagnetic resonance stylii that let you doodle on the screen and annotate your digital texts. Sure, that seems like it'd be useful for a particular set of ebookworms, but now that we're in the era of the iPad, watching and waiting for that E-Ink display to refresh is even more grueling. Still, the hardware looks pretty sleek, and might be a good fit for those who remain committed to their marginalia. [Engadget]

Pickleback
At the beginning of February, Nickelback had 1,380,820 fans on their Facebook page. Facebook user Coral Anne wondered if a Pickle could get more fans. So she started the group, "Can this pickle get more fans than Nickleback?" The answer was yes, yes it could; on Friday, the Pickleback surpassed Nickelback in terms of Facebook fandom. The little stunt apparently did not sit well with Chad Kroeger, Nickelback's frontman, who fired off this snooty little message to Pickelback's creator. No matter—I think she got her point across. [The Daily What]

Hype Machine
This morning, everyone was abuzz over a little cube called the Bloom Box. The publicity stemmed from a 60 Minutes segment in which the Bloom Box was described as a "power plant-in-a-box," and posited as a "miraculous" solution to our energy crisis. Well that'd be great, wouldn't it? BoingBoing, however, was quick to cut through the hype and peg the Bloom Box for what it really is: a gussied-up fuel cell. Here's how it works:

[The creator, Sridhar] said he bakes sand and cuts it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic. Then he coats it with green and black "inks" that he developed.

Sridhar told Stahl there is a secret formula. "And you take that and you apply that. You paint that on either side of this white ceramic to get a green layer and a black layer. And...that's it."

Big Bloom Boxes are currently powering some buildings owned by Ebay and Google and the results are indeed promising. Sridhar says that he hopes to shrink the Bloom Box down to be cheap enough for consumers sometime in the next 5 to 10 years, which usually translates roughly to 10 to never years. So, all in all, is the Bloom Box miraculous? No. Is it revolutionary? Probably not. Is it a viable option for cheap, renewable energy going forward? Maybe. [BoingBoing]

Safe!
Neatorama deems him a "real-life Superman." I don't know about that, but this guy, who dashed in front of an oncoming train to push a truck off the tracks, definitely has some super cajones. I like how he and his buddy celebrate so ecstatically right after his daring feat. And rightfully so. I'd imagine the "I just saved a car full of people" high five is the best high five of all. [Neatorama]

Nap Time
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley—nappers that they are—have determined that a 60- to 90-minute nap in the middle of the day can increase your brain's ability to retain facts that you learn later in the day. Which is great, because I totally have an hour and a half in the middle of the day when I'm just sitting around trying to figure out how to replenish my brainpower. Oh wait no I don't. There have been many studies like this that show how the mind benefits from naps, but they never seem to make it any easier for me to find time to do so. [PhysOrg]

That Data Center Is Fully Operational!
You know that tingle up your spine you got when you first caught a glimpse of the Death Star II? Watch this fly-by video of Apple's new $1 billion iDataCenter in Maiden, North Carolina and tell me if you get the same feeling. Still, you'll probably learn to love it—in the iCloud future, this is where all of your data will be stored. (Unless it's stored on a Bloom Box-fueled Google data center, that is). [Data Center Knowledge]

Can You Hear Me Now?
Fast Company has a piece about the 10 most addictive sounds that are currently nestling their way into our brains (largely without us even realizing it). The study, conducted by Buyology Inc. and Elias Arts, ranked the top 10 branded sounds and the top 10 non-branded sounds. The most addicting sound for each, respectively: the Intel jingle and a baby giggling. The article touches on how advertisers have begun to understand our brains' addictions to these noises, and how soundbites are playing an increasingly large role in branding. All Intel needs to do is get a baby giggling "bumBUM bum BUM" and they're unstoppable. [FastCompany]

There aren't details on availability and pricing for this case, but who cares when the promo video alone is fun. [CrunchGear]

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Xfinity Ads in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs under 800k in size, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

Actually, that's far from the truth. Both phones are pretty damned gender neutral, unless you're the type of person who believes only men appreciate hard lines and ladies are drawn to curves. And apparently that's what Verizon believes, based on their advertising.

I mean, just look at these new Verizon Pre ads! Why are they showcasing this as a phone for moms? It's a quite capable phone that people of all genders and ages would enjoy. But I guess if they made the ads for the Droid so explodey and masculine they thought they had to make up for it with these.

Hey Verizon: they're both good phones. Feel free to just advertise them as such. [Engadget]

The video comes from "the twisted minds" of the Upright Citizens Brigade, so you can blame or applaud them for it. I'll be here feeling guilty for giggling. [UCB Comedy]

The ad foils commercial-skipping DVR users by planting a brand icon—that grasshopper there—in the middle of the screen throughout the ad, and ending with a simple information panel. It looks more or less the same whether viewed at regular speed or high speed, so even if ad-skippers don't have to sit through the audio pitch, they still end up absorbing some of the ad's information, in theory. Another neat trick: By using this gimmick, Grasshopper has fooled numerous bloggers into posting about their ad. Planning on spending your commercial break browsing Giz? Ha. Grasshopper'd.

If they have the choice, people don't watch ads, and increasingly, people do have a choice. I imagine we'll see more than a handful of awkward stunts like this over the next few years, at least until traditional TV advertising falls by the wayside, replaced by something more akin to the unskippable ads we're starting to see in online video. [Adrants via Gawker]

Setting aside the '90s taint on the ad, it's strange to see how much Apple pumped the faxing angle on the Newton in its subsequent TV spots, which we'll be revisiting soon.

Google's filed a patent entitled "Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising," and it should allow them to automagically cut out billboards shown in Street View and replace them with their own current ads.

In theory, this would be done in concert with whoever owns the space, so a theater owner could keep the posters out front up to date at all times. This seems to be the only way for Google to get away with doing this, as if they suddenly started sticking ads on other people's property without their permission, things could get ugly fast. [Telegraph]

But hey! Maybe this custom version of TweetDeck is really really good, and since all iPhone apps have to be sold—or in this case, given away—through the App Store, it must be listed somewhere, right? Well, not under Interscope, not under Best Buy, and as far as I can tell, not under anything obvious. Says the product pages for eligible CDs:

Follow these steps:
-Select a CD below.
-Click the Add Items to Cart button at the bottom of the page. The TweetDeck download instructions card will automatically be added to your cart.

There don't appear to be any download instructions in the cart item, so to someone who doesn't know better, it would look like the only way to get this app is to buy one of the eligible CDs.

Best of all, this EXCLUSIVE Twitter app comes with unlimited free Tweets from whoever you follow. Only at Best Buy! [Consumerist, TweetDeck on iTunes]