Tag Archives: #marketing

Guns, Games, and Style

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Over the past couple of days I’ve been in contact with a few consumer product marketing contacts I have, asking them how the Marketing community in general views advertising within videogames and virtual worlds. The answers were, in all honesty, both disappointing and a bit shocking. These are not junior level marketers, these are experienced and highly-placed individuals. Yet not one of them seems to “get it”; worse yet, they haven’t paid enough attention to even know there is something to “get”.

Well, if there are any marketers reading this, I’d like to suggest taking a peak at Kevin Werbach’s viewpoint article over on BusinessWeek online. Then I’d suggest a rethink of the general concept of advertising – and in particular advertising budgets in new media formats; it’s probably orders of magnitude less than what most believe. Having done a little research, many might then not casually dismiss in-game/virtual world advertising as something they could never afford. Unlike television ads where a company pays for each airing, in a virtual world they really only have to pay once… and then let the world propogate your brand all on its own. It can be as simple as selling one product with all your advertising magically bundled inside it along with links to real life sales sites, and then letting each person who comes in contact with it, buy a copy of all that for themselves for use within their virtual home (note the expectation that virtual commerce will shortly exceed $1B annually). Of course that won’t make sense to most people. Just as one representative for the American Cancer Society’s Futuring and Innovation Center said yesterday at a virtual meeting conducted within the vr sim Second Life, the biggest barrier to acceptance is the inability of most organizations to understand the concept. You’d think that with all the economic turmoil out there, they’d be looking for opportunities. I’m learning otherwise.

SL Product Design

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rebangterminalW

Not actually the first design I’ve created in Second Life. I’ve already constructed a monopod vehicle (that requires some additional code to limit rotations to prevent it from “shoveling”), a hoverpod (that’s sluggish in the turn), and eye glasses that play streaming video (cool, but only a test). And this. It’s actually the second in-world vendor terminal I’ve modeled. The first, unfortunately, had “copy/modify” permissions improperly set (ok, I’m a noob), and as a result may now be in use somewhere in Second Life without my knowledge. It was intended for a virtual world competition, but given its possible… likely… emancipation, I opted to design a second one – the above. That object was entered and soundly defeated (so much for my ego). However, it marks a turning point in my second life, so I decided to document that here. And apart from it’s magical ability to defy gravity, I’d like to see a kiosk like this in real life (it looks better in-world. honest.)

Stranger In A Strange Land

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Jellybean Madison

As mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been spending some time exploring Second Life’s virtual world. One expects that objects, graphics, animations, physics and the rest improve in this corner of cyberspace just like they do most everywhere else. That’s just technology, and videogames have certainly been showing off some amazing things lately. But what I’m finding interesting is how real people interact with – and through – this virtual world.

Take for example the above image, “sittin’ at the crick…”. For lack of a better description, this is a “photograph” snapped by an SL “resident”, Jellybean Madison. She (apparently) posted it online from within the SL simulation using a third party tool called Snapzilla. I’ll let them explain it:

Snapzilla [is a] new feature from SLUniverse that allows everyone in Second Life to share their snapshots with the world, directly through SL. Downloading snapshots to your hard drive and then uploading them is hardly spontaneous. With Snapzilla, you just click the Snapshot button in Second Life and choose Email Postcard and you are on your way to sharing your snapshots.

An image posted and given a caption? Emailed to others? Shared? Why? I don’t know exactly because I’m too new to the experience. But I have noticed that there are other, similar tools in beta which send images to sites like Flickr, possibly the best known and most popular image-hosting website on the net. So these snapshots will be seen by a large audience; many of whom have never been inside a virtual reality sim. Furthermore, in as much as all images online are really nothing more than colored pixels, these “photos” are as real to the strangers who view them as the “real” photos taken in meatspace using a 35mm. And when the graphics improve in years to come, who’s to say what’s valid and what isn’t?

But it doesn’t stop with photos. I was checking my email yesterday and discovered that an “in-world” message had been forwarded to my real world email. Lines blur. It’s one thing to know of this interactivity and another to experience it. And even more interesting are the number of independent projects coded by residents for doing things like tracking virtual world assets (which have real world value in many cases) outside the simulation. Now that sounds like the kind of thing Microsoft should build into their Xbox 2 feature set.