It also got me to wondering what it is that people get from these things. Do people really draw motivation from this stuff? I have been reading Darren Brown’ s Tricks of the Mind , or at least re- reading sections of it, this week. He points out that m…

I need a few more minutes later today to read that response properly, but in my quick scan, I think you’re right that we agree on many points.

Thanks for such a thoughtful reply, and I think we’re actually agreeing on many points, we’re just saying it differently. Or should I say, I’m saying it without precision and you’re picking up on my tendency to vaguely ramble around a few loose points.

First, I should clarify. I’m not so naive to think that brand managers were betting their budgets on Second Life. It was always an experiment. But the cold sweat part isn’t in experiments on Second Life, it’s on the sea change in media. As I say, they’ve spent decades perfecting buying commercials, and they’ve been deluged with all this new media and fragmenting audiences and worrying about Google, with some agency and brand folks wondering whether Google might not be more of a threat than an opportunity, others wondering how the heck they can ‘go viral’ anyways.

They placed exploration bets. Some worked, (bad hair day on youTube) some didn’t. The bets they places were in Second Life, or product placements in games, or setting up mySpace groups or whatever.

The cold sweat part for the brand managers is that what’s hot never seems to STAY that way. That’s what I meant – not that they expected Second Life to be their branding platform, just that they keep placing these investments in the new promised land and can’t seem to get them to stick in a consistent way. Second Life yesterday is a widget today is a Metaplace branded gamelet tomorrow…but which ones will actually *work*? So they try to come up with some sort of reassuring model, measurement, revert to traditional media models, place bets in more than one place…my point is there’s no easy answer for how to deal with all of these options because the issue isn’t that there are more technologies or platforms, the issue is that the nexus of creation has shifted…we will always be a society that consumes entertainment, it’s just that the people creating that entertainment no longer need to live in LA or New York to be in the game (hehe).

Second. I’m not actually advocating here for Second Life. It may sound that way. Second Life for the purposes of mass entertainment and branding doesn’t work, at least unless someone can figure out how to better integrate it with other platforms…thus the walled garden discussion.

Should virtual worlds be interoperable? I don’t quite see the point, frankly. Someone is bound to come out with an avatar meta site…one log in, one age verification, one wallet, and it will act as an intermediary on your behalf for entry into various virtual worlds. And as far as porting content all over the place, that kills innovation in my mind. I DO believe that SOME content will tend towards standards – look, they can’t even get 3D animation software to talk to each other (not well anyways)…try reading about moving stuff from Maya to ZBrush or over to Vue and you hear the artists screaming in frustration and writing macros. It’s not like Second Life has put up some NEW impenetrable barrier, this technology for creating 3D content is complicated and seems to involve arguing over nurbs and polygons and render engines and what the heck does that have to do with making a beach house anyways.

I’ve come to the belief that open source is a beautiful thing. However, it’s a beautiful thing for specific types of development where the opening up of technology might be enabling, but in other cases it’s a recipe for poorly designed code that you then need to hire all those open source people to maintain or understand, and what the open source people really need is to make sure they bring a technical writer on board to make the user documentation actually usable by someone other than the coders. It may be open source, but that doesn’t make it openly accessible.

OK. So. Where does that leave me?

One, brand managers wake up in a cold sweat because it used to be you could choose and audience, find out what they were watching or where they were playing and then populate those spaces with content that they might enjoy (after some market research, testing, etc.).

Two, Second Life investments were an example of trying to get a handle on one of the many sorts of investments that are now available in a rapidly shifting and evolving marketplace.

Three, one lesson learned is that these investments can’t work inside little walled gardens. The only thing that makes sense is to be far more strategic with investments in newer technologies, game spaces, virtual worlds and social media. Which means creating brand stories that bridge all these spaces.

BUT, and here’s my big but – the problem is that brands aren’t just competing across so many new media and spaces, their stories are competing with the stories created by others. Stories created by some kid in their basement, or the Star Wars fan geeks making their own movie with George’s permission, or tomorrow’s Guitar Hero superstar.

I didn’t claim that Second Life was a platform for self-expression because it has building tools. (Or maybe I did, I’d better check, but I don’t think so). For me, Second Life is a story box, and it’s a beautiful test case on what can happen when you take self expression to its extreme. But the reality is that only a small slice of the SL community actually make great stuff, a slice make OK stuff just because, and the rest of them participate in stories of their own design – dancing, shopping, changing their avatar appearance, heading over to the Rezzable date sims, visiting a gallery, taking a class.

So there’s something mixed up here. Because my THEORY is that we’re in a world of ever increasing self expression. Second Life is ONE example of this (which is why I mention youTube and Facebook so much) and brands came into it trying to insert into an expressive community, and it was a nice experiment but didn’t quite work.

And again, I’m not saying that EVERYONE is going to be an artist, or a songwriter…but I AM saying that the people who consume these things are giving equal attention to the artists who aren’t backed by record labels, or publishers, they just toil away on their own and create little clusters of fans around them.

Because the tools for creation are being democratized (and look out for 3D printers and the ability to design and fabricate our own running shoes or custom create our own t-shirts) this is also leading to a shift away from territorial morality into a tribal one, and I’m a believer that this is a profound social shift, as well as one which might be a wellspring for new forms of magic, but don’t say that to the branding guys, it’s what I mean by “maybe some day they’ll get it”.

The brand paradigm will shift because it won’t have a choice. It will need to shift from thinking about target audiences, eyeball time and thin clients into metrics around co-creation and expression. Lego maybe gets it. MTV sort of gets it. And the marketers in general will eventually get it as well.

Second Life is a cool place to be if you want to grab some insight into what the logical extension of a full form of self-expression looks like. There are few platform controls (TOS whiners aside). The tools are fairly limitless (hard to learn but still) and so if you want to see what the full flowering of self-expression looks like, and how the consumers of that expression react and how identities and social communities shift and form in the face of it, come in and have a look. (Not YOU. I know YOU’VE come in and had a look, and by the way I like your little store. )

In the meantime, we can plan to ride the sweet spot, and I TOTALLY agree, the Web is where it’s at. But if I was modeling a brand plan of the future I wouldn’t just be looking for this year’s eyeballs and time and so on, I’d be looking at objectives related to whether I ended the year creating new ways for my brand to respond and be co-created with, ways for brand extensions to be developed in collaboration with a community of users, methods for integrating product development and manufacturing into my marketing touch points such as through the use of 3D design spaces, new approaches to including community expression and goodwill as a line item in my financial reporting, methods for being a respectful participant in the open source communities who are probably coming up with their own ways to make a version of my product only better, and I’d end the year happy if I’ve reached a bunch of people, but I’ve also extended my business practices outside of some new measurement devices for advertising.

Hmmm.

Well.

I realize I kind of went off on some sort of rambling soap box. It’s exciting stuff and exciting times I guess. Because I really don’t think brand marketing is going to look anything like it does today a few years from now, and I suppose it’s fun to watch what happens.

This realization that the 2D web might actually be BETTER than 3D is also the point I am starting to object to “the metaverse isn’t here yet”. The funny thing is the 2D representation on the flat internet is a choice we’ve already made some time ago. We translate 3D info into 2D. 3D is very time consuming and often requires a lot of explanation because of the various point of views, 2D has already ‘framed’ the mental picture’ the sender wants to communicate to its receiver. Furthermore, obviously 3D requires obtrusive applications for mostly fleeting, or ubiquitous actions (chat, music, information gathering) while thin worlds cater to what seems to be the core function of virtual worlds for the masses (almost all fleeting applications) in a much better way thick clients do – which is why these thin worlds could be better than thick worlds, but still WORSE than websites. Which makes for another interesting point. Why is it these virtual spaces have become so compelling to us, that these virtual worlds have become the goal itself…

I believe the ESC is not going to provide the answer to that we should be looking for. For them its most of all a niche. A niche they strongly believe in but a niche of companies willing to spend money on exploring these ‘new’ environments. But the truly interesting part to me, is what compels us about virtual worlds /is/ how tremendously compelling they are to those open to its immersive nature.

As it became a rather long reply I finished it over on my own blog:

http://digado.nl/thoughts-on-the-metaverse.html

A few reactions though:
I don’t think brands moved from SL to other places. I don’t think they were ever really there. Oh sure we had some big names dabbling, but the number of significant brands who were doing anything other than playing with innovation budgets in SL was quite small. If SL felt like the center of the universe to the residents for a bit, it was because of all the press. To serious brands, it had only half a million users back then and *still* only has half a million users. Brands were interested in where this could go and grow, but growth stalled. The numbers show that SL is incredibly interesting to its power users, but few others are coming and staying right now.

Most brand managers didn’t feel like they were yanked into a space of large promises and small results. They felt like they were putting tiny budgets into a cool new experiment area, and hoping for good results. The only people talking about SL as the new frontier of riches was the media, but any savvy brand manager knew better. I seriously doubt that they are in a cold sweat.

You talk about the people in SL having different ideas from what the brand managers thought — ie empty islands and poor projects. Oh sure, there were dud projects. Sure, some brands had a very hard time getting out from under their RL realities (give me my RL store, my RL product, my RL marketing approach). And with bad projects, SL users yawned, and often for good reason (but never mind that when you tried to make something actually fun with multiple users, the technology broke all the time — and your average person doesn’t care about explanations about why havoc crashed or LSL executes slowly or their 128MB nvidia card is struggling — they just know it’s not fun). To brands, SL had meaningless numbers from an eyeballs perspective. They never expect to get a huge percentage of any pool, so they look to big pools. 500K people? Not enough by a long stretch. So yes, brand participation could have been more compelling, but would that have been enough, when SL remains highly interesting to half a million people and uninteresting to everyone else?

We did a project with iVillage (late 2006, early 2007) that got tons of accolades from the community. SLers *loved* it. There was no central sim — rather it was about exploring SL. But iVillage looked past the applause from the community and blogosphere and looked at the total numbers and said, why am I bothering with this? Now, I think they should have continued, but my point is just that there’s a lot of silly retrospective oversimplification going on (then again, that’s nothing new).

And what is a walled garden? Is Amazon a walled garden, versus CNN.com? They are separate spaces but exist on the same Internet. If two virtual worlds exist on the same Internet, is that different? OK, this is about social spaces so things should be interoperable right? Then again, human beings tend to put themselves into communities, so is it a problem that you have lots of separate communities? Interoperability would be nice, but how many runs at that have been tried on the Web and failed miserably.

And self-expression. I personally love Second Life because I’m an artist. It was and is a wonderful canvas. But most people don’t express themselves through easy-to-use building tools. Instead it is through how they act or collaborate or dress or write or dance.

I think SL remains really interesting. But I have to face facts that few others on the planet seem to think so right now. I do think that visual communication on the net is important, and I do love the dream of Second Life, but I think it will be a ways coming, and that there will be multiple steps to get there, and that the platform to get us there might already be here… called the Web. But maybe SL will pull it out. It will be interesting to watch and help make happen.