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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

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LaPiscean

I believe that when the money is available, TV will be the mass media platform for reaching all Virtual Worlds in a single stroke. ô¿ô

Adric Antfarm

It just has to be done right.

I found the Facebook summer promotion cheap and sad, but when it's done right it's another story.

Yes, we are not a huge group, but I submit we are a damn dedicated one.

Please quit quoting JPN numbers. It makes my head hurt. That is one market that moves in a cocaine heartbeat and we all know it. Fad city. The Monkees revival anyone?

Ancient Shriner

There was no 'bust' cycle. There were only a few real advertisers in Second Life, the rest were land extortionists. The real ones joined The Advertisers Guild, the extortionists refused to abide by our code of ethics. There was only boom and more boom with money on the table before Linden Lab hatchets sealed the day.

The Advertisers Guild championed responsible advertising back in late 2007 and early 2008. Our code of ethics became the Oct 1st, 2008 Ad TOS, except for two points: Item 1) Height Restriction - LL has 8 meters, we had 'reasonable for the terrain' and Item 2) 50 Parcels per Resident for advertising, with no grouping together.

It is Item 2 that killed the ad business literally just as it was taking off as it is impossible to get sufficient traffic with 50 terminals to justify the operational labor, collocation servers, and sales/marketing efforts necessary to make an ad business work. I had agreements with over a dozen big name brands to use our AdSoft powered networks in Second Life, where we had presence in 1800 Main Land sims, with 1 sign terminal per sim. Our traffic garnered 150,000 unique avatars per ad per month, with a sizable inventory of ad space available for sale.

We have serious money invested in our systems: thousands of hours of software development and labor, tens of thousands of dollars in promotion and tradeshows, and more on advertising, marketing, etc. We were just about to monetize our investments when LL pulled the rug out from under us, literally to the day at the Virtual Worlds tradeshow in LA, Sept. 2008. They harmed us greatly and they know it.

What they did was an egregious violation of ethics at the very least and most likely something much more heinous. We are still waiting for them to make good on their promises to us, but we aren't holding our collective breath. They have a long history of trampling on their customers and it might be part of the reason their numbers are stagnant. With LL is so busy sticking it to their top evangelists, who is left to spread the good word?

As for the future of advertising in Virtual Worlds . . . it’s very bright indeed regardless of Linden Lab. We’ve gone on to empower entire OpenSim grids with advertising systems and we’ll have announcements forthcoming.

Marketer

But when you have ads on more than 50 mainland parcels LL brings down the banhammer.

A virtual world, more than 50,000 users and only 50 adverts allowed...*sigh*

Arcadia Codesmith

"I hope advertisers return with humility.."

I think the best you can hope for is that they come back with their hubris rechanneled in more productive directions.

Humility is pretty much the polar opposite of marketing.

coco

Bring back Joe Jaffe and his Crayon. We need more jokes like him. 150k people from 15-65 with no common interests other than avatar sex chat, greifing and gambling is not exactly an advertisers dream. Unless you make/sell sex items, open source code snips and gambling machines.

Ancient Shriner

We have professional grade software Coco. It allows us to do categorization of click traffic by type, and build profiles of which category of ads are clicked most often in specific locations. We don't profile the avatars, we profile the ad terminal locations, so we can offer more relevant ads at those locations. The more data we have, the better we can segment and the higher click-though rates we recieved. With 15-20 million impression minutes recorded per month, for over a year, I'd say we have the largest ad activity data set by far . . . and most likely the only such dataset existing. Advertiser’s Dream? Perhaps not, but certainly worth their while and was getting better all the time.

Crap Mariner

I've thought about this one from a consumer/customer standpoint.

And then promptly deleted the note in the Blackberry.

Their problem, not mine.

-ls/cm

Arcadian Vanalten

Personally, I'm not enthused about advertising in SL at all, period. I think we're oversaturated w/ marketing as is. I spend all day w/ radios, billboards and ads shrieking "Gimme your money, buy my stuffs, NOW!" at me.

I'm in that segment of the population for whom SL remains entertainment and recreation. When I come in-world, I'm looking at coming in and unwinding. I'd look forward to that refuge going away about as much as I'd look forward to telemarketer calls during the entirety of my supper. I really kinda resent over-ambitious marketers going, "Oh, wait, there's a fraction of your life we haven't co-opted for our purposes! Quick, lease a chunk so we can slap a logo or 3 on it!"

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