New sizzle, same sausage?

“And conquered worlds." If you’re male, mid-thirties and either a gamer or interested in advertising, you probably read that sentence in a Scottish accent. You didn’t need the picture. You knew the exact intonation.

This was the moment that your geeky habit, thanks to “the power of Playstation” with its smart selection of launch games and even smarter marketing, became something grown-ups could do. More than that, it became something you could own up to and still be cool. According to rumours, even girls were starting to play and it wasn’t a simple choice (as one marketing director put it at the time) between “games or girlfriends”.

It’s fair to say that this was a powerful piece of advertising in 1998, catalysing what is today one of the UK’s most successful creative industries.

In fact, it seems the ad was so good, that Sony are re-running it for the launch of the new Playstation Vita.

And it’s not just Playstation. The Guardian, amongst others, are also flirting with their past. Try popping the endline- ‘the whole picture’- from their recent ‘three pigs’ ad into YouTube and see what comes out.

So the point of this post is to pose a question. Are we returning to the comfort of the familiar in a world of increasing change (as suggested in one of our Imagining 2012 pieces at the beginning of the year)? Or are we, as agencies, hiding behind new technologies and higher production capabilities to obscure the fact that our ideas aren’t as engaging as they once were?

Fourteen years ago, that Playstation ad changed my life. Not just because I realised there was a chance of redemption for my inadequacies with the opposite sex, but because it influenced my career choice. When you look at today’s branded experiences, which ones do you think will have bloggers in 2026 saying the same?