Linden Lab Hires First CMO. Is It Good or Bad That He Has Little or No Metaverse-Related Experience?

This is the biggest executive move by Linden Lab since Philip Rosedale returned as an advisor last January:

Second Life hired its first-ever CMO as the race for the metaverse heats up...

Linden Research, Inc., the developer of pioneering metaverse Second Life and parent company of the newly launched virtual economy payment processing platform Tilia, announced the expansion of its leadership team with two key C-suite hires. Steven Feuling, a more than 30 year senior marketing veteran, has joined as Linden's first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Peter Capraro, who's held security and IT roles across his 25 year career, has joined as the company's first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)...

Feuling has worked with and for some of the world's best known brands including Microsoft, Bloomberg LLC, The Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Fox, E*Trade and General Motors as well as several successful start-ups. 

Business Insider story here (reg req.), full PR here. As that passage above and his own LinkedIn profile suggests, Feuling has quite a lot of experience in media and adtech firms.... but little or no direct experience working on metaverse platforms, games, virtual worlds, or other related technology.

Not necessarily a criticism! I'd weigh the pros and cons this way:

Pro: Second Life in particular needs a CMO with the ability to create partnerships with major media brands, and optimize its advertising. A CMO without any prior game/virtual world experience is more liable to propose unexpected projects and campaigns outside Linden Lab's core focus. David Fleck, Linden Lab's former VP Marketing and Business Development back in the day, also had no prior game/virtual world experience, but was instrumental (for good and ill) in accelerating Second Life's 2006-2008 hype period, mainly by pushing forward a single change to the product: Making SL user accounts free.

Con: Second Life's core problem -- continued lack of sustained user growth -- exists at the code and UX level. This will be difficult for an inexperienced CMO to recognize or change. Second Life to this day gets all kinds of free promotion via earned media (i.e. actual news coverage), and about 300,000+ people create an account every month. The challenge isn't lack of marketing, but rather, that 99.9% of those new users return to the platform for any extended amount of time. (A daunting high percentage of new "users", as one Linden vet told me, quit during the download process.)

All that said, let's see if Feuling can fuel Second Life. (See what I did there?)

Comments

[Tonia Thraw]

The "new users" who quit at the download process are more than likely alt accounts because try as we might, we CAN'T do with just one account. If we build, we'll need tester accounts, support accounts, and, often, people use alt accounts for photographic purposes, too. I'd also assume having a "public" avi in addition to a "private" avi is common for those who work on Second Life, so when they're logged in as a private person, they won't be bombarded with support questions and the like. "Off the clock", as it were.

But there is one thing a new face can do: BE IMPRESSED. Someone who has never seen Second Life or a metaverse in action cannot be but flabbergasted at the diversity of it. But Second Life has one huge risk; the adult content, which to me makes Second Life one of the final frontiers of freedom of expression, and whenever there's a new guy at the top I fear they're going to attempt to "clean up" Second Life, which would effectively MURDER it. SL's adult content is like healthy gut bacteria, it may be bacteria, but without it, you freaking die.

[Lnn Nishi]

I hope Second Life can expand with the hiring of C-level personnel. Another area that can expand is among residents. SL is highly visual. It's one reason we go in... to explore. Another is meeting new people and even forming friendships. The visually impaired cannot participate. Perhaps there is a Viewer allowing more than just chat. I don't know. Would there be a way to easily add the equivalent of Alt-Text used for images in web pages available in SL? Navigation is a whole 'nother area.

I hope the infusion of new blood will also make the platform accessible to all.

[Adeon Writer]

A bigwig who who has no experience with user-created content platforms?

The NFT people will be drooling at the mouth to sweet talk him.

Hope he's at least privy to that.

[sirhc desantis]

Hmm having been married to (and possibly involved with not being married to now but I am allergic to lawyers so I move a fair bit) a 'marketing' for close to 2 decades I will just watch this and keep gob zipped until any change is manifested.
Ser Writer nails it though.
As for adult content - gentle reminder to any who rail against 'adult content' that they were the result of (mummy and daddy or mummy and mummy or daddy and daddy or/and other means but def not stork delivery) 'adult' activity.
Although on that last part we have a case here of some clueless person railing against their kid being told that milk comes from cows whereas they insist its made in shops. In Sweden. Yeah go figure.

[jackson redstar]

SL is just way to hard for new users I think. And unless one had a gaming computer they can expect a bland and or laggy experience. And what makes SL SL is also a downside for new users, namely, there isn't really anything to do until you get it figured out

[Rugan]

Dear Mr jackson redstar
Nowadays, at least 90% of people have a gaming computer.
The problem is new users; they have little constructive imagination. They prevent prostitution for a few Linden dollars. Ten years ago, events were organized to promote creations, clothes, etc. Today all this has disappeared.

[Marly Milena]

The new marketing officer might want to talk with denizens of SL who came in and stayed. Most of the people I know in SL have been there for over a dozen years and have integrated the experience into the rest of their work and/or personal lives. I started a Virtual World Educators Consortium (VWEC) which is made up of educational institutions and educators (both academic and lifelong learners) now able to occupy a landmark called Eduverse. A lot of the founders group have been in SL for many years and are finding ways to make it easier for new users to acclimate and find their niches. We have a liaison to the Linden group who focuses on helping us address the challenges and needs of educators in SL. We are making it possible for new users to locate places of learning easily in one region.

[Argo N.]

Let me focus on AdTech. AdTech is surveillance capitialism. It is all about monetizing the details of your customers choices, actions and preferences. Google and Facebook (Meta) made a fortune by doing this. Now almost everyone sells their customers details. How would this work in SL? Easy! Say we modify the browser or sim to collect say 50 variables about each avi actions, who they meet, what they say to each other (NLP is pretty advanced, think of Google), what they do to each other, etc. Maybe those 50 variables don't exactly ID you as an individual RL person but they are close, so close we can treat it as unique. Then we sell this data into the wild west of data brokers and resellers. One or more of these "research" firms finds a way (its not hard) to de-anonymize and marry the data with mountain of existing data about you (which anyone can buy) and sells this product to companies responsible for deciding your insurance premiums, setting the rate of a loan (credit risk) or a deciding an offer of employment. You get the picture. At its most benign a company will target you with advertising for products you are likely to buy. But that is not where the less benign parts of this industry is moving. Remember the Cambridge Analytica case? All they did was use a quiz (via Facebook) with a more or less standard model of personality to figure out how to understand your motivations. Really finding what motivates you, even if you are not aware of all the factors has moved on and now routinely employs AI models to make accurate implications about about you public and most private.
Bottom line is LL can potentially make a lot of money selling this kind of detail about its users. The unwritten TRUST we, as long time SLers have with the Labs is that they will not do this. A breach of that TRUST would be a disaster. Even if they hire a new wiz bang AdTech guy.

[Iggy 1.0]

Until LL can fix basics such as crossing a sim line in a sailboat, marketing won’t make users accustomed to gaming stay. And no, not everyone who uses SL has a gaming PC or really fast connection. I know a few residents who stopped visiting because of lag.

SL visually can look stunning, as compared to what I recall from a decade ago. Avatars, in particular, look superb. But to make it work well, I have to dial graphics back so far that it might as well be 2009 again.

The Lab might want to fix that.