In Part I of our interview with Sony Computer Entertainment America senior vice president of marketing Peter Dille, he explained the thought process behind the ad campaign for PlayStation 3. Here in Part II, Dille tackles Microsoft's two-tiered strategy for Xbox Live, Sony's anemic blog presence, and why Ludacris is the kind of boldfaced name he wants to roll with. (Click here for Part I.)

Microsoft recently announced that Xbox 360 game demos and trailers would first be made available to their paying Gold members. Their Silver members, who don't pay an annual fee, will have to wait as much as week before getting access to these promotional materials. What do you think of this?

I love that announcement, because it paints a very stark contrast with how our service is set up. We have a free service; you can go online at no cost to get demos and trailers. We're not going to charge people to access things like that. It really hits home the difference between Microsoft's online offering and our own.

That's the consumer side. From the marketing side, how much sense does this move make to you, given that these ads and trailers are promotional in nature?

From our perspective, we want as many people as possible to plug their machine into the Internet and get connected. All of our research shows that price is a barrier. They might say it's not the ultimate barrier, because they've been charging people, but our research suggests that it is a barrier. To your point, if you've got a game demo, why would you want to make it hard for someone to get it? Demos are the ultimate marketing tool in this category. We want to put them in as many people's hands as possible.

Microsoft acquired Massive, which enables publishers to serve up dynamic advertising in their games. Are you worried that this might be a prelude to Microsoft making multiplayer free to everyone and finding alternative ways of getting Gold members to pay an annual fee?

No, we're not worried about that. They've got their own business objectives, and that's for them to worry about. We're very comfortable with our approach. Once you get people online, there's an awful lot they can do. We've got a Web browser. We've got a standard hard drive. That's something they don't have. We've got text, video, audio chat. We've got free access for people to go online and play head-to-head--with a game like Resistance, which has 40-player multiplayer--right out of the box. Once they're there, we're confident that there's a range of content that they're going to be compelled to purchase, and we can recognize some downstream revenue from microtransactions, from games that were built specifically to take advantage of the PS3's horsepower, as well as a very large portfolio of PS1 games that we can make available via the network.

You want to talk about untapped potential, what's to say that in the future we couldn't use this downloadable service for other content? You can see right now in the PlayStation Store movie trailers, and there's a tab for music. Currently there's no content offering there, but you can see where this could go next.

Microsoft has been really active with their own blogs. They've got Major Nelson, Gamerscoreblog, Ozymandias, all reaching out and speaking to the gaming community. Sony is pretty removed from that scene, more it seem more aloof. Do you have plans to address this?

You raise a good point. My hats off to them from a marketing and PR perspective.. They spent a lot of money, they devote a lot of resources to it, and they do a lot of it quite well. Being relevant in the digital space is something that I want to see our organization do better. We've made some moves recently to do some of that. It's baby steps, but it's something you'll see more of from us going forward.

Having said that, from a broader PR perspective, six months ago--and I'm not taking credit for all of this--when I came on, there was a lot of skepticism about PS3, a lot of negativity. Our competitors were partly responsible for stirring that up. That's the way it works. Today, we're seeing a sea change in people's attitudes about the PS3. They understand the content offering, they understand the technology, they understand what we're doing on the online side, which was the last key piece of the puzzle. Everyone's wildly excited about the product at this point.

The celebrity and events side is an area where PlayStation is unmatched. Now that you're in charge, where do you see celebrity and influencer outreach going in the future?

Sony, particularly Andrew House [former head of marketing] and Molly Smith [former head of PR], were the first to pioneer this and make celebrity events in our category relevant. Today, I don't want to say that it's a dime a dozen, but everyone's doing them. From our perspective, once everyone starts doing something, it's not that it has no value, but we want to make sure we're doing it in a way that befits our brand. It's not enough just to get a celebrity to touch your product, without the credibility and relevance of being a gamer. We've got a very rabid fan base of consumers, and some of them are celebrities. They love our products. They're gamers. Those are the people we want to work with. And there's still a great place for that going forward.

At a recent press event, we had Ludacris perform. He's a big gamer. Those types of associations make sense. But to just have a beautiful person on a runway with a Playstation 3 sign behind them, if that's something where someone's just available for the buying, that's not terribly valuable.

Previously: Dille discusses his vision for the Playstation 3 ad campaign.