There’s a sweet spot somewhere out there for marketers, a dream space where that elusive beast the consumer (that means you and me, or maybe not, maybe it means Joe FlickrPack with his mySpace page and his Facebook widgets, but in any case), and the Electric Sheep Company are graphing it out and hunting it down.
And they’re on to something. Because what they’re trying to do is build a bridge from the vision and promise of the Metaverse to today – where it’s a lot messier looking, and the technology isn’t quite there yet, and the user base isn’t quite large enough, and the promise and hype of last year and the rush into Second Life was followed by….hmmm, well, it was followed by a rush into the promise and hype of Facebook widgets, or is it viral youTube videos like that bad hair lady, or are they now sniffing around Twitter?
The reality is that big brands are scrambling. All those old models and metrics are falling to the sidelines and we’re hearing words again like aggregating eyeballs, and there’s talk of curating brand experiences, and it’s all viral this and viral that, and the brands are scared, they’ve spent way too long perfecting a process for buying Superbowl commercials but hey, they won’t let this get away from them just yet and if you can walk into their offices with assurance and poise you might be able to pry open their wallets and throw some money towards something cool and some day they’ll wake up and actually GET what you’re talking about instead of just nodding a lot when you move your hands around quickly and look like a hippie.
The Assurance of Balance
So here’s the question. What do you do when you’ve hung your hat on the metaverse coat rack, but you were slightly ahead of your time, or you were ahead of the technology, or maybe you were in synch with the technology and time but it went zipping off in the direction of Facebook and widgets and mini games and Papervision?
Well, you map it, and put numbers around it, and this is reassuring, and kudos to ESC, because they’re helping to take away the anxiety of those brands who really want in, but were kind of spooked by abandoned sims, and bad press, and don’t want to place their bets on the wrong team, it’s far better to cover all the spots on the table, one of them is bound to pay off.
We’ll call it the sweet spot (or ESC will):
(Source: ESC)
Because its gotten more confusing not less. First, we were talking up virtual worlds, full immersion, deep experience, games with a difference, a vast collaborative be bop version of the Internet, people flying and living and wow, maybe even working in there, getting married, making a million in virtual real estate. But before anyone knew what had happened, the metaverse got a whole lot LARGER than it was, it just stopped being called Second Life.
So now what. The brand managers are in a cold sweat. There’s no way they’re getting yanked into large promises and small delivery, this time around they want a surer thing. And the sure things these days are games and social networks.
Remember all the press about Second Life? Seen all the press lately about social networks and Ning and Facebook and the billions in valuations and the little kid millionaires churning out widgets and launching, don’t know, personal media aggregators?
And games…well, we’ve seen the Wii, and the Wii is good because the Wii has senior citizens bowling!
Now there are some markets we can believe in. But what’s even better, is we can believe in those markets but get a jump start on the competition because we’re going to throw in a bit of that virtual world stuff for good measure, keep it fresh, although….hmm, problem….Second Life is bad blood and bad press and we need something a little, hmmm, safer.
And the problem is the learning curve (we’re told). And the problem is the client (we’re told…tooooo looooong to dowloaaaad). But there’s good news! Because the clients are getting thinner, and the worlds have more controls, and your brand is safe with us, we’ve seen the future and it’s not like the future we once saw, because the future is different now! It’s measurable! And it’s Web ready!
Walled Gardens Are Lonely Places for Brands
I’m not poking holes in the ESC strategy. They have it right.
I’ve been horribly confused about the concept of the Walled Garden but I’ve taken it to mean something like this – a walled garden is a virtual space where its integration with other Internet “stuff” is minimized.
World of Warcraft is a walled garden.
Um. Or isn’t.
See, that’s where I have a problem. Because no matter how hard they try, WoW ISN’T a walled garden. No space is, unless it’s so ineffective that you really don’t WANT any of it to seep out. But WoW tries really really hard to be a walled garden, it’s just that its users have other ideas, and they’re using voice, and they have fan sites, and they’re selling stuff, and they’re trading tips and maps and cheats.
OK, so maybe it’s a simplification. Maybe a walled garden isn’t the prevention of other stuff around a platform or environment its the preservation of the fiction within it. But my point is that there’s a tendency when people live their lives to compartmentalize, because we have to, but to also want to carry the cool stuff from one place to another.
And experiences are like that, and brands are like that too…brands don’t exist just in the store, they exist in all those other places in life that the brands are used. And brands look for ways to associate themselves with those other places, and with the cultures that thrive in them, and so ESC is playing to the tendency of brands to want to cross-integrate their messages across a variety of media and platform, reaching specific cultures and buyers and users, and that means a) not throwing all your eggs into the “one world” basket and b) trying to find the worlds where the cool kids are, or at least where your brand is going to ‘resonate’ and ‘go viral’ and all those other things that everyone really really hopes means selling more stuff because otherwise there’s going to be a lot of widgets lying around a year from now.
So if you’re going to make a branding play in virtual worlds, you can’t just stop at the doors of the metaverse, you’re going to need some Web stuff, and some stuff stuff, and it’s going to be as much about communities and fun and socializing as it is about technology.
Which also tells you something else. Because if you follow the logic of all that through, you’re going to start thinking like a brand person, and start getting starry eyed at these brand advocates and early adopters and tipping pointers and viral engineers and, hmmm, maybe want MORE of it, and more CONTROL of it, and so you might start building your own.
I mean….100 worlds for kids? Good luck. You can maybe get 3 hit movies out of kids a year. Or a handful of hot video game titles. And there’s usually one “must have” toy at Christmas.
We’re looking at a future with 1,000 virtual worlds for 1,000 brands, not to mention 10,000 widgets, and these things, my friends, are next year’s abandoned sims.
It’s Not About Time and Technology, It’s About Expression and Control
The ESC has put a nice spin on things. And it’s healthy, and it’s a good way to explain to the marketing guys that virtual worlds are still relevant, because they exist in an ecosystem of social networks and games, and those are hot things, and spend your money wisely, do cross-platform, integrated, measurable, tightly knit stuff.
And if they do that, and everyone gets comfortable again because some agency wins a Cannes Lion award, then that’s good news for the metaverse, because the technology will advance, and in the meantime the real work is being done by the little people. And the schools. And businesses. And Amazon and Google and Microsoft and, well, the games.
Because in the meantime, what’s happening is that while everyone frets about technology, and social networks and widgets, there’s a shift thats happened and that continues to be (in my opinion) best expressed in Second Life (and increasingly a few of the “collateral” open source worlds, and less so in the more contained and controlled worlds like There.com and Multiverse).
And the shift is into ever-increasing tools for self expression. And the shift is into ever more control in the hands of those pesky users. And here’s a “counter” model (P.S. this is called a “mash-up” I think):
But what does it mean for brands? Because it looks on the surface like the sweet spot, that place in the middle, is probably still safest (and by the way, um, this is just a brainstorm not some scientifically precise map), so if you’re a brand maybe you’re best off with some social games and maybe a locked down Web-based world.
Consumers of the Creators
But I sort of wonder. If we learned anything from last year’s testing of the Second Life waters by the big brands it’s that before you know it the technology either didn’t advance like you hoped it might. Or even worse, the people whose eyeballs you were trying to aggregate had their own ideas.
And my theory is that we’re not all creators. Some of us just want to be passive, or passive participants. But that increasingly the things that we want to participate in have wider modalities of expression and far less control by others.
American Idol takes us way down the scale on self expression in a tightly controlled package. YouTube takes us down the scale in another way, taking off the controls all together and making us all judges and consumers of expression.
So while the brands waffle around in the middle, struggling for some control and dolloping out some tools for expression, most of them still sort of believe that it’s about consuming media and not creating it. They see the masses of consumers, and don’t believe that those kids poking around with Garage Band or those artists mashing prims together in Second Life are REALLY the people they need to be talking to. They have agencies after all! Agencies are FILLED with creative types.
But I’m not sure it’s going to turn out that way.
Maybe this really is the cusp of a renaissance. And maybe there’s more going on than a bunch of new platforms that we need to put on a graph and nod over. The graphs are great in the short term. They’re assuring. They’re like a kind hand on the shoulder as we sign that check.
But while we’ve been nodding and plotting, the graphs slipped a few notches to the side, and we find ourselves recalculating stuff all over again.
[...] BEEN A TEASER. Head on over to the new domain to read the rest of this brilliant and scintillating article. Or, because I have a picture of an old guy bowling on a Wii. Posted in Metaverse [...]
I enjoyed reading this. Nice post Dusan.
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.
The graphs in the article are used as a nice way to present subjective data as an supposedly objective point of view. Because of the 2axes structure you can pick the 2 qualities to support your theory and work from there, but the ’sweet spot’ is pure fiction. A dot on a graph but I don’t see any real reasoning why thin, captivating virtual worlds would be a good all-round solution. It isn’t. You need to cross reference that with demographics, mostly age, gender. Brand acceptability and actual measured results because at the bottom line, you need to create sales. Perhaps then you will find these thin virtual worlds are actually really expensive solutions to something we can already do a lot cheaper, a lot faster, and a lot more efficient if you are looking for brand engagement.
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
Giff:
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.
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.
[...] some ways, this speaks exactly to the point I was making yesterday in the far-ranging discussion with Giff of the Electric Sheep Company: in a world in which there is increasing self-expression, [...]
make money online…
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…