Don't know if you've had chance to catch the latest Bravia TV commercial from Sony yet; okay I'm a little behind the times on this one. The Ad has been running for a couple of weeks now, although there was a huge amount of viral advertising kicking around including bystander videos. It's the follow up to the classic Bouncy Balls commercial, except this time the bouncy balls are replaced by 70,000 litres of paint and North Beach/Russian Hill, SFO have been replaced by Glasgow's Toryglen estate!

There's a write-up on in the Magazine pages of the BBC News site which goes into detail how they found a 60's Tower Block in Glasgow which was awaiting demolition, covered surrounding houses in (very) very large polythene sheeting, paid off the locals and then proceeded to explode those 70,000 litres of paint off over the shop.

I don't reckon it's quite as cool as the original Bouncy Balls ad, it's a little bit too British to honest! Don't know if the decision to avoid an ubercool, downtempo, voal/lounge/dub soundtrack was premeditated (Balls was dubbed with José González's cover of Heartbeats. Something like that might not have sat so well this time around.

Would it encourage me to buy a Bravia? Well I'd probably be encouraged to start looking once I'd seen the advert on someone else's HDTV. Start looking after Christmas that would be, and probably not at the Bravia "Engine" range (1) because they don't seem to do a 37" screen (I've been told we can have a 37" screen!) and (2) cause I think an engine in the living room would probably be too noisy, especially when you're trying to watch something good on telly!

It did leave me thinking though, what might we be able to do for a Project Blackbox TV commercial? Maybe we could enlist the Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson - he's renowned for having a bent for trying to destroy his most hated cars (and any caravan) by varying and increasingly more inventive means; he once resorted to targetting a Corvette with an helicopter-mounted gatling gun.

A few years ago Top Gear attempted to destroy a Toyota pick-up; they tried:

• drowning it in the Severn Estuary
  
• dropping a caravan onto it
  
• attacking it with a wrecking ball
  
• setting it alight
  
• dropping it into shot (must have been at least a 30 foot drop)
  
• driving it through the "production office"
  
• hoisting it 240 feet aloft another 60's tower block and having the tower block demolished from beneath the Toyota.

It survived all that and was still drivable (they allowed themselves to do roadside repairs where necessary, but no parts could be replaced and the only consumables they used were a few sprays of WD-40 and a gallon or so of diesel.

Hmmmm on second thoughts, maybe that's not sure that's quite the message we'll be going for with Project Blackbox.