Sony Make.Believe Contest
I was one of 10 contest winners in Sony’s Make.Believe branding campaign. Sony’s CEO Sir Howard Stringer’s email below.
TO: Sony Employees
FROM: Howard Stringer
DATE: November 12, 2009
Dear colleagues,
Thank you for the remarkable enthusiasm you have shown for the internal make.believe kick-off and employee contest across the U.S. and Canada. As you may know, we received nearly 1,000 entries from every corner of the company and from employees at every level. I am incredibly proud of all those who contributed, because your amazing personal experiences tell our Sony make.believe story best.
Last week, I announced our three Grand Prize contest winners. They are: Dave Chaimson from Sony Creative Software in Madison, Wisconsin; Erika Kato from Sony Computer Entertainment America in San Diego, California; and Lauren Rivera from Sony Pictures Television in New York. Each of them will have his or her story turned into a professionally directed make.believe videography to debut publicly at CES in January. I know they’ll be terrific. In addition, each Grand Prize winner will receive a trip for two to Las Vegas for their video debut, along with a grand Sony product prize package.
Today, it is my great pleasure to announce the 10 contest runners-up, whose stories are equally inspiring. The winning stories of all of our winners and runners-up, which have been minimally edited, can be found below. Each runner-up will receive the Sony product prize package. They are:
- Erwin Coumans, Simulation Team Lead, Sony Computer Entertainment America
- Wende Crowley, Senior Director, Film & TV Music, Sony ATV/Music Publishing
- Marc Mackin, Senior Artist, Sony Online Entertainment
- Jeff Merghart, Senior Artist Animator, Sony Online Entertainment
- Christopher Nelson, QA Supervisor, Sony Computer Entertainment America
- Tim Nilson, SVP Technology & Operations/Direct to Consumer, Sony Music Entertainment
- Brian Orr, Principal Software Engineer, Sony Media Software & Services, Sony Corporation of America
- Cecil Prado, Assistant Director, Sony Pictures Entertainment
- Adam Visnovec, Customer Information Center Representative, Sony of Canada Ltd.
- Ling Wong, Associate Software Engineer, Sony Electronics Inc.
Congratulations to all of you!
Thank you, again, for proving that the passion behind make.believe is inside all of us, and for helping us share it with consumers around the world.
Sincerely,
Howard
TIM NILSON
Title: SVP Technology & Operations/Direct to Consumer
Company: Sony Music Entertainment
Story: In 2000, a friend and I realized that mobile ringtones were quickly becoming big business across Europe, but that there was no good solution available to create mobile ringtones, merchandise them, and sell them to consumers. We knew that we could leapfrog the competition and believed that we could build a better technology platform to create musically pleasing ringtones. We founded our mobile start up, “RunTones” in New York in early 2001. When we showed Sony Music what we were doing in 2002, the Company was so excited by what our platform enabled that it bought our company and made us part of the team to create and execute its mobile strategy. Since then, we’ve helped build a global ringtone business for Sony Music selling many hundreds of millions of ringtones – all created by the technology platform we believed we could create and commercialize.
