Sony never kept an official upload of this online, so the primary link is Digital Cinema Media's copy, the UK cinema advertising body, which is the most stable one out there. If it ever goes, this 4K upscale is the backup. The making of is worth four minutes of your life.
In 2005 Sony was launching Bravia, a new LCD television brand, into a market that had turned into a specification war. Every brand was shouting numbers: contrast ratios, response times, panel technologies, refresh rates. Fallon's research found what you would expect. Shoppers could not tell the brands apart, did not understand the numbers, and had quietly decided that all flat TVs were probably much the same.
The strategic move was to refuse the argument entirely. Sony's corporate line was "like no other", and Bravia's version of it was "colour like no other". So the job was not to prove better colour. It was to make people feel colour, on a medium where every competitor's ad is also being watched on a television, which means you cannot demonstrate your picture quality through someone else's screen.
Which leaves you with one honest option. If you cannot show the colour, show what colour feels like.
Fire a quarter of a million coloured bouncy balls down the hills of San Francisco and film it.
No television in shot for most of it. No specification. No demonstration. Just a wave of pure, physical colour coming down a grey street, with José González singing a hushed cover of The Knife's "Heartbeats" over the top. Then the line.
That is the whole ad. The balls are not a metaphor for colour. They are colour, moving, in a place you recognise, at a scale you have never seen.
The detail is the reason this is not just a nice thought. They actually did it. The team sourced roughly 250,000 superballs by phoning every funfair and novelty dealer in America, because the Chinese factories could not make them in time. They closed a San Francisco block. They built twelve custom air cannons, each loaded with about five thousand balls and firing at around sixty miles an hour. The camera crew, twenty-odd people, worked in body armour behind riot shields, shooting on high-speed Photosonics cameras.
It is all in camera. The Mill, one of the best post houses in the world, was booked to clean it up and ended up with almost nothing to do. That was the point of doing it for real: no animator would have chosen the motion that actually happened. The randomness reads as true because it is true, and you can feel that even if you cannot name it.
Then the rollout did something ahead of its time. Residents filmed the shoot on handycams and put it on YouTube and Google Video before the ad had aired. Instead of fighting it, Sony leaned in: a dedicated site at bravia-advert.com, the making of released as content in its own right, and the track pushed as a single. The behind the scenes became part of the campaign rather than a leak.
The stupid: your product is a television, and your ad contains almost no television. Your claim is about picture quality, and you make the argument with rubber. Spend a global launch budget closing a residential neighbourhood in a foreign country to fire two hundred and fifty thousand projectiles down a hill at sixty miles an hour, in camera, with no reliable way to reshoot it if the light goes, when a competent animator could have rendered the whole thing in a room in London for a fraction of it.
The smart: doing it for real is not indulgence here, it is the entire strategy. In a category where every brand was making claims, Sony made an event, and an event cannot be counter-claimed. More precisely: the medium defeats the message, because nobody can judge your colour through their own set. So the only way to win is to make a piece of film so physically overwhelming that the viewer's takeaway is a feeling about colour rather than a fact about panels. And it is disciplined. One idea, one location, one piece of music, one line at the end, no features listed, no voiceover explaining what you are seeing.
The steal: when your category has collapsed into a numbers argument, do not bring better numbers. Bring an experience the numbers were only ever a proxy for. Whoever stops arguing first and starts showing usually wins the room.
The thing we keep coming back to is the restraint. It would have been so easy to cut back to a Bravia showing the balls, to have a voice tell you about the panel, to put a product shot at forty seconds. Every one of those additions would have made it worse, and every one of them is the sort of note that gets given in a real meeting. Somebody at Sony held the line on an ad for a television that barely shows a television. That is a client decision as brave as any creative one, and this newsletter does not say that often.
Twenty-one years on it is still the reference point everyone reaches for when they argue for doing something practically. That is a long shelf life for rubber.
Straight talk: the sturdiest business number on record is the share one. In the six weeks after "Balls" launched, Sony's share of the UK LCD television market was the highest it had been in two years, and Bravia went on to lead that market. Beyond that, Sony has never published an audited effectiveness paper for this spot, so anyone quoting a precise sales lift is guessing. The chart position is real and independently verifiable: González's cover reached number eight in the UK and spent thirteen weeks on the chart after the ad, which is a decent proxy for how far the thing travelled.
One number to ignore: you will see "$25 million budget" repeated online, including in viral posts comparing it to AI recreations. There is no credible source for it. It is a made-up figure that got copied, and the ad's real reputation does not need it.
Losing the Grand Prix to Guinness is one of the better arguments that award juries and history disagree more often than the industry admits. Both are great. Only one of them still gets shown in every planning deck.
Client: Sony, for the Bravia launch
Agency: Fallon, London
Creative director: Richard Flintham
Art director and copywriter: Juan Cabral
Planner: Mark Sinnock
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Production company: MJZ
Post: The Mill, largely unused
Music: "Heartbeats", written by The Knife, performed by José González
First aired: UK, 6 November 2005
D&AD, the Sony "Balls" case study
Campaign, Campaign of the Year 2006, Sony Bravia
The Drum, World's best ads ever, number 42
PetaPixel, on the shoot itself
Official Charts, "Heartbeats" chart run
shots, twenty years on
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: