Success Metrics: Metaverse Advertiser Claims 34,000 Engagements In Three Months For L’Oréal Paris Campaign

The virtual copies of L'Oreal products which appeared last year in Rezzable's popular giant living room/kitchen play space were actually part of a larger advertising campaign in Second Life for the cosmetics giant orchestrated by UK-based metaverse agency KZero.  Last week, Nic Miltham published the firm's final results, in Rezzable's Greenies (above), and four SL fashion boutiques.  (There, KZero distributed several L’Oréal-branded "skins" which simulated make-up styles associated with the company's products.)  Over the campaign's three months, 34,000 of the four branded items were picked up by Residents; as a percentage of the 550,000 monthly active user base, that's a 1.6-6.2% virtual item clickthrough rate.  (The spread based on how many of the four L’Oréal skins each Resident took.) Quite impressive, compared to traditional web ads, which are lucky to get even half of one percent. (Even as a percentage of the 1.1 million 60 day user base, that's somewhere on either side of 3%.)

Those are top numbers for Second Life-based advertising, but The Electric Sheep's Giff Constable wonders how good they are, when compared to other virtual worlds:

If you talk to Matt Bostwick of virtual MTV about the results they have seen from sponsor integrations in vMTV, and the impact they have measured on consumer purchasing decisions, your eyebrows will go up. The statistics are really good.

How good?  Take another virtual world for teens, Gaia Online:

Gaia’s campaign for New Line Cinema’s fantasy adventure The Last Mimzy, for example, challenged their users to accomplish a series of tasks in order to get their own special Gaian-only Mimzy (a super-intelligent bunny). Hundreds of thousands of these Mimzyies were given out—meaning some 10-20% of their total user base jumped through the hoops to win the advertiser’s prize.

Offhand question:  while the audience numbers from ad campaigns in teen-oriented online worlds are indeed impressive, is that largely just a function of the age demographic?  I've yet to see comparably high numbers for in-world campaigns aimed at MMOs with an older player base.  Anyone think of an example?

Comments

[nic mitham]

Thanks for the article. Somewhat ironic that a MDC that relied heavily on SL in 2007 is suggesting campaigns perform better in other worlds. Easy to say in hindsight for them of course.

On a different note, wouldn't it be interesting to see all of the agencies (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/04/metaverse-busin.html) release some metrics from their own campaigns. Fair play to ECS in this respect.

Then we would see how good these numbers really are.

[hesslei]

The light-skinned woman with the flowing blonde hair would like you to buy some hair dye.But a closer look at the advertisement for the cosmetics giant L'Oréal reveals that all is not well with the face of its campaign. It appears that L'Oréal has caused not just her hair but her skin to change colour.

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hesslei...

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