We have a responsibility to be honest to clients. I think many in-world companies went to corporates selling them ideal and notions of inflated potential rather than the reality. I’ve heard Second life pitched as “A virtual platform where you can reach over a million subscribers.” And that not technically accurate. We have yet to reach even 100,000 concurrency as far as I know. It appears to me that people like Mr. Stiger see the future value and possibilities of Second Life, but have gravely misunderstood it, as many corporates have. Despite what Mr. Kapor Stated last year in his keynote speech, SL is still being molded and defined by it’s users. It is being given a multitude of purposes and many of those in various industries are just coming to understand what those are. It is critical to recognize the inadequacies of Second Life, but keep in mind the wonderful future it has in store as a pioneer of virtual education, media, marketing and more.

>The benefits of virtual worlds have never been about brand recognition, unless that brand brought some valuable content or context specifically for the virtual world.

Of course they have. There.com methodically and consciously sells ad space and invades the content with corporate offerings and has the time of their life. They make money, and the kids in There get the brand jackets, cars, sneakers and they don’t care. They love it. It’s ok. They are not harmed. This concern that VWs must be scrubbed clean of brands and no brand can ever come into a friggin’ virtual world unless it’s a precious Lilith Heart tree or something is completely whack. NOBODY BELIEVES THIS except this small handful of geeks bleating about it in SL in the sandbox and at Metanomics. The rest of the world, led by people like Reuben of vision, have stampeded off to the large populated worlds which at this stage are kids’ worlds. And there they will follow those kids as they grow up and go on to other platforms that will also have brands and ads. And Second Life will be a goddamn backwater of freaks unless they start selling the ad space like normal people do with normal media.

Yes, I realize the politically-correct geek-o-rati point of view about these things is that the brands have to bring a benefit inside the VW — usable swag, clothing, a virtual car, something. Well, sure, that’s nice. But…guess what. People actually have no problem with seeing a Sears washing machine and a Dell computer they aren’t actually touching and using in world if it can tie up to their RL in some way with information, and that merely means staffing. It’s not rocket science. It will work. That it didn’t work, as I explain in my blog, is directly the fault of the cynical and anti-corporate geeks who ran the “solutions providers” companies at the time. Full stop. Get them out of the way, and bring in a new bunch. Please.

There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Coke having a Druids Mentos thing. They should have a 100 such things. In fact, it shouldnt’ be up to me to hack together a “coke vending machine” in SL out of existing resident made stuff because the Coke bottle of the real Coke island is so crappy — again, because the geeks working the job had contempt for it like Mo Hax does. If those people hired to do this hadn’t been rolling their eyes, we’d see better results. They did, so we didn’t. THEY ARE THE PROBLEM, NOT THE PLATFORM.

Most people don’t react with an eye-roll and contempt to ads. They click on them. Ads work. There isn’t some gigantic class of people for whom they don’t work. That class is a niche, it is small, Reuben gets that, and Reuben moved on until the Lindens, and their special ones like Mo Hax, understand that they need to get out of the way of progress here.

That whole phase of real world brands coming into SL was just craziness. Some of the companies that experimented are actually not just out of it, but bankrupt now or close to it.

The crazyness may have been in the acceleration or the hype but it need not have failed if the geeks of SL in Linden and close to Linden had been willing to sell the ad space. That’s all. I explain this problem at length in my blog, and really lambast them for having the cynicism, as a class of people, to insist that we all live with ad farms for the sake of their geeky notions of needed 16 m2 for script testing, while they simultaneously refused to sell the ad space available on the splash screen. It was a historical missed opportunity. They can make up for this, but they’ll need to walk firmly around people like Mo Hax in their own ranks.

This is one of the more stupid things I’ve seen in a social media in a long time:

“Advertising as we know it is going away, as you point out. It has been a useless pursuit for so long, imho.”

The entire Google monster, the entire Yahoo machine, the entire old-media machine moved to the Internet like nytimes.com runs on the ad principle. The ads, be they aesthetic or not, get clicked on, they lead to sales, and they work, and they pay out. That’s the reality. Mo Hax may find it culturally unaesthetic; Mo Hax may find it politically unacceptable. But it’s what works, and will go on working despite him lol.

>People buy what their friends are buying and recommending because it is working for them.

This, again, is one of those silly geek ideas that has only a very small niche applicability that can’t work with the mass of people, on mass media, or selective channel media like Second Life. Not everything is run on a “word of mouth” principle. A solitary person clicks on the ad he sees on his media — on his email, blog, You-Tube. In SL, he sees it flying around or on his splash screen and clicks. End of story. Get over it. Get over *yourself*.

>Stop wasting dollars on hype/advertising and spend them on making a good product that at first you only let a select few have, an ‘in’ crowd.

Oh, please. Huh? Run the world on the principle of the FIC? Are you DAFT? Dollars spent now on Google ads pay out ROI and keep Google and its many businesses dependent on it afloat. These are ads served to the public, not to ingroups buying an i-Phone and testing it out with geeks. The geek method of selling crap must not be replicated across to other sectors of society — it won’t work, and it’s disastrous as a concept because it means only niche media that geeks approve of then gets to be supported with ads in the way they like. That’s whack.

>Then, as Seth Godin and others point out, that novelty will market itself. Why did Google smash Yahoo? Because more people recommended it. Hardly a nickle spent on advertising that I have ever seen.

Seth Godin is really a danger to society as he is one of those “though leaders” actively undermining basic freedoms and pushing totalitarian groups. I need to take on his Little White Book one of these days. It’s a horror. The only reason Google smashed Yahoo was because Wikipedia and Google cooperated, and not Wikipedia and Yahoo. that’s all.

>And Twitter, I don’t see that advertising at all, but it is exploding onto the radars of everyone. The community is the advertiser, sorry Weiden & Kennedy.

Twitter doesn’t need advertising when it is in the VC stage burning through VC injections. It will, eventually, like Google and Yahoo need advertising.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/02/the-reuben-sandwich-virtual-worlds-as-ad-space.html

BTW Dusan’s posts are probably as long as, or longer than mine.

In the amplification of Second Life, we can see there is a certain type of geek’s deep-seated hatred of capitalism and commerce (except, of course for the geek’s own widget business!) that constantly disrupts this conversation about advertising and public engagement and constantly hobbles progress in developing these worlds. Constantly. Over and over again. And it’s ironic that in Metanomics, which is supposed to be about economics and business, these unemployed or semi-employed coders who show up with time on their hands to sit and watch machinima and chat in a wonky interface are the very people who HATE capitalist business. You wonder, what is there purpose in coming to MetaNOMICS if they can’t grasp that the ECONOMICS of these worlds cannot and will not be socialist, but will be capitalist? Hello?

The one person in the chat with this point of view willing to aggressively flog it — one Reed Steamroller who was making ridiculously stupid comments to me (like accusing me of admiring Madoff’s “genius” just because I saw the wisdom in selling advertising!) — and the 2-3 or three who grumbled about advertising, mass culture, and capitalism along with him, aren’t the norm even on the left in SL. They are a hard core that keep dominating this discussion, however.

This was above all a cultural battle in the cultural wars of Second Life. Reuben was despised by a few because he represented mass American culture which is hated especially by Europeans on the left and certain progressives even in the U.S.. Someone like Reuben is hated for representing big corporations which are hated, especially by Europeans on the left. But…we can’t let Europeans on the left (and Canadians, and Japanese and anybody else out there) hobble progress. Media needs to sell ads to support itself. Media will always sell ads to support itself. Media will go on selling ads to support itself despite your belief that it should be ad-free and culturally superior and paid for…out of a tip jar or Dusan’s budget or something…

As for Coke, if they actually had a Druid quest that would give you ‘Coke bottle’ form with some sort of deal with Mentos to provide a special attack when you combine them. (/me finds own eyes rolling)

That whole phase of real world brands coming into SL was just craziness. Some of the companies that experimented are actually not just out of it, but bankrupt now or close to it.

Advertising as we know it is going away, as you point out. It has been a useless pursuit for so long, imho. People buy what their friends are buying and recommending because it is working for them. Stop wasting dollars on hype/advertising and spend them on making a good product that at first you only let a select few have, an ‘in’ crowd. Then, as Seth Godin and others point out, that novelty will market itself. Why did Google smash Yahoo? Because more people recommended it. Hardly a nickle spent on advertising that I have ever seen. And Twitter, I don’t see that advertising at all, but it is exploding onto the radars of everyone. The community is the advertiser, sorry Weiden & Kennedy.