Mixed Reality Object Count: What are the most successful RL-to-SL virtual item marketing campaigns?

Tateru Nino's Mixed Reality Headcount tracks the number of visits to real world company promotional sites in SL, but that's just one way of measuring the impact of the real world marketing efforts in Second Life.   (And it's currently on hiatus, as Tateru automates the counting process.)

Many companies sell/give away virtual copies of their products, and that's also worth tracking.  Here's three prominent examples that come to mind:

- Starting in November 2006, Nissan began giving away virtual copies of its Sentra model.  By September of this year, according to Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep Company, which developed the SL effort for the car company, Residents have claimed 68,000 Sentras.

- Starting in September 2006, Adidas began selling virtual copies of its a3 Microride model for L$50 (about 25 cents.)  By February 2007, according to Ben James of Rivers Run Red, which developed the SL effort for the shoe company, Residents had bought 23,000 pairs of Microrides.

- Starting in July 2007, IMAX began giving away branded objects (3D glasses, etc) to promote showings of the latest Harry Potter movie.  Within a week, according to Joni Rich of Second Marketing, which developed the SL effort for the theatrical chain, Residents had claimed 15,099 Harry Potter/IMAX promo items.

There's good reason to believe these are impactful engagements.  As Forseti writes:

That’s not a zillion eyes that saw and glazed over as their eyes tracked to the relevant parts of the Webpage or hit the DVR fast forward button. That’s 68,000 (and rising) who have taken time out of their day to voluntarily interact with Nissan, and hey, that’s pretty cool to me.

Also another way to count return on investment, though as the above samples suggest, that's quite literally an apples-to-oranges comparison problem.  (Rather, cars-to-shoes-to-3D glasses.)  Investment rates will widely vary, too: both Adidas and Nissan distributed/sold their products on branded islands owned by the company, while Joni Rich's effort was not location-based, but conducted through avatar-to-avatar interactions near Second Life's welcome areas.  Some are designed as long tail schemes, while others are conducted in a brief flurry of promotional buzz. These figures are self-reported, too, and it'd be difficult to independently verify item distribution in a consistent way.  Still, when calculating the impact of real world marketing in the metaverse, it's just as important to consider the rate of virtual item distribution, as location visits.

What other campaigns of this kind are worth reporting on?

Comments

[Moriash Moreau]

The Adidas attempt, among others, always puzzled me. In particular, why sell the promo products, as opposed to giving them away? Total sales of ~US$5,750 would be a king's ransom for the average SL businessperson. To Adidas' marketing arm, it's fiddly small change.

Don't get me wrong, L$50 seems a quite reasonable price for a quality set of av footwear. (I'm assuming, perhaps naively, that folks wouldn't have collectively dropped a million L-bucks if the products weren't reasonably well made by SL fashion standards.) But it doesn't make sense to me for Adidas to bother charging even that. I have hopes that these fees are being passed to some non-Adidas third party in-world. And, if so, more power to them.

But, if not, is there some other reason for a RL megacorp to charge a token fee for promotional virtual goods? Is there some finer point of perceived value that I'm missing? To me, it seems on par with charging for a promotional T-shirt or an advert-laden frisbee at a RL tech convention.

[T_S_Kimball]

The fee for the shoes may be just their way to simplify item counts; They can just download and scrape the avatar sales records and be able to have a specific count of unique users.

The way to do it nowadays (with html interfaces available) is to have a vendor link to a LAMP site backend, and have the out-of-world database records in real-time to count unique sales.

Even if the vendor is offering free copies, it does not mean that it can't be done in such a way that you can't count them (and more importantly, who has them). Records in both the above cases you'll have the user's 'key' and can start scraping the user profiles (via libsl etc) for demographics.

--TSK

[csven]

@Moriash - the reason is pretty straightforward: by giving away free content, Adidas could adversely impact the in-world economy and potentially put native SL creators out-of-business (see "Competition Law"). That could result in a backlash against Adidas because what you call a "promotional" item isn't necessarily perceived as such by residents. Users would most likely view it as an effort to turn SL into a marketing space, and that would probably not go over well; perhaps even lead to an exodus which would defeat the purpose of the effort.