The positive re-appraisal of Second Life by Web 2.0 marketing exec Chris Abraham I mentioned last week is now being run on the website of Advertising Age, the ad biz's leading publication. Combine that with the recent Industry Standard's report that Second Life is superior across several metrics to top social networks and more importantly, the apparent end of the real world economic recession, and it's likely we'll start to see some real world advertising campaigns return to SL soon. (For those just tuning in, Second Life experienced a mini-dot com boom of RL advertising sites for most of 2006-07, but reached its nadir in 2008, not simply because most campaigns failed to generate decent ROI, but also because as recession approached, experimental advertising was usually the first thing cut from marketing budgets.)
It's doubtful Second Life will ever see as huge a marketing push again, unless or until it becomes a truly mass market platform, not with hundreds of thousands of regular users, but millions. However, it's likely we'll see some small baby step campaigns, especially by the high-tech companies already using SL as an enterprise/conferencing system. If that happens, I hope advertisers return with humility and the wisdom of lessons learned. Among the many points of advice I'd give, would be this one:
Market to the Web 2.0 Ecology Around The Virtual World: Because virtual worlds are by their very nature dynamic and synchronous, a tremendous amount of activity related to them actually takes place elsewhere, in the Web 2.0 content-sharing ecology — screenshots sent to Flickr, machinima uploaded to YouTube, blogs and conferencing systems where users discuss their latest experiences.
This is true of all virtual worlds, and especially true for Second Life, where 133K users account for 90% of all monthly in-world activity, but where external Web 2.0 channels provide the full breadth of SL culture. (17 million pageviews from Japanese SL blogs alone.)
If you're also a veteran of the metaverse advertising boom/bust cycle, what would you advise, if and when the ad dollars return?
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
Posted by: LaPiscean | Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 02:35 PM
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?
Posted by: Adric Antfarm | Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 03:10 PM
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.
Posted by: Ancient Shriner | Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 03:48 PM
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*
Posted by: Marketer | Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 03:48 AM
"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.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 06:41 AM
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.
Posted by: coco | Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 04:49 PM
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.
Posted by: Ancient Shriner | Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 07:41 PM
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
Posted by: Crap Mariner | Thursday, October 01, 2009 at 10:44 AM
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!"
Posted by: Arcadian Vanalten | Thursday, October 01, 2009 at 11:36 AM