Slippcat has come out of the closet at the Virtual Worlds conference here in New York, and that closet is filled with objects that will be served to you free from their warehouse and that will earn your fellow Second Life citizens a Linden or two if they click on it. So watch out, because if you make stuff now, you’re about to compete not just with freebies, but with paybies.

Slippcat is boldly setting out the “change the face of advertising”, although one consequence is they may change the face of menu-driven poseball furniture and other, um, odds and ends. Slippcat is trying to slip into that gaping need for brands, advertisers and agencies to “serve the ads and measure, measure, measure”. One of the topics for discussion here at the conference is measurement and return on investment. Slippcat is trying to fill that gap by becoming the DoubleClick of virtual worlds.

Slippcat’s idea is fairly simple:
- Give out stuff for free to the residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds
- Embed in that free stuff ads, messages and information
- Pay people to access those ‘embeds’ on a “per click” basis
- Measure it all, track it, and report back to the advertisers on the number of views, length of view, proximity to message (did I just use the word proximity?), all the good measurable stuff that lets you calculate some kind of return on investment

And lifting from Google, the cost per click and what it pays out will be run auction style. According to their literature:

“As the prices are set by bidding by the advertisers (much like web context-driven word ads) payouts would depend on the advertiser’s budget. Say that Office Depot and Staples had very similar office chairs in-world, but one of these was offering higher payments, then the odds are that *that* chair would be appearing in more in world homes and offices.”

Slippcat is planning a warehouse of goods that their development arm will create, sponsored by companies (like Office Depot), and give the merchandise out at no cost to the in world communities. So, say I want a couch. I get a free one from Slippcat. Now, benefit is, my friends come over to visit, they like the couch, they click it and yes, they get an ad or a link to the Office Depot (or Pottery Barn, or whatever) Web site, but they also get a few Linden dollars for the effort and time.

Speaking with the booth babe from Slippcat (actually, not really a booth babe, more a geeky computer type as befits a VW company), I asked about their vision for how this rolls out. And it encompasses everything from posters, to kiosks, to education, to furniture, to shoes. Yay! Clickable shoes! (Hmmm, I wonder if they’ll be Xcite! compatible – imagine not only getting paid to click someone’s, er, accessory but also elevating their….OK, never mind. I also wonder whether clickable Slippcat beds will include sub-menus for the poses, but again, I don’t mean to illuminate the dark corners of my mind, just point out some of the things that people might want to do with all this “ad farmed furniture”).

I asked one of the senior folks at Slippcat how in-world content creators felt about the service.

“They hate us,’ he said.

I’ve been arguing for some time now that the in world economy should be protected, but that there’s a growing sense that content creation itself won’t be sufficient as a way of generating decent revenue for a variety of reasons: copybot, of course, and a copyright enforcement approach by Linden that I don’t see getting any more brilliant or well-managed. But also the ubiquity of objects in a landscape where nothing ever deteriorates or wears out, it just gets lost in inventory.

If interoperability arrives, and it will (whether as a workaround hack or as a sanctioned part of the code), then when you make a shoe for one world it’s just as good for all the others. So, you can make really, really good shoes, but be aware that you’re pretty much competing against free, and now, not only free but against stuff that actually PAYS to own it. Branding, loyalty, in-world presence, experiences, community – all the “soft” stuff will be increasingly important in competing against all these hard numbers guys who are serving out Lindens because there’s some advertiser somewhere who will believe that by demo-ing their couch in someone’s virtual house, they might get them to buy it for their real one.

My first vote is for Obus Forme to come on in, because I could use one of those about now.