Brands came to virtual worlds, they left, we griped, we moved on – and now they’re all hanging out track side in Need for Speed or trying to get posters up in Ironforge or something – I’m waiting for the day that you can buy Coke in Darnassus, except maybe some kind of relic Coke, one with special powers, given out the same day as the Superbowl because what geek wouldn’t be in WoW instead of being athletic with the remote.
Someone told me that Reuben Steiger would be a lightning rod by appearing on yesterday’s Metanomics but I didn’t quite get it. I mean, this stuff about the brands coming and the brands going happened years ago, right?
I thought Dizzy Banjo summed it up nicely in response to my previous post on the topic of metaverse agencies and virtual worlds:
“I think its a shame to think of the 06/07 period as a regret. That was a period of people trying to do something very hard – make a virtual place pay for itself in real world terms. Those projects deserve respect for trying this and indeed finding out many things that don’t work, as well as many that do.
Applying the Gartner hype cycle to just the adoption of Second Life is an incorrect reflection on the larger development of virtual worlds. When considered along that 30 year time-frame, the peak of inflated expectations and trough of disillusionment are just a little blip, similar to many before.”
But there’s something…maybe a feeling of abandonment, about the Reubens of the world heading off to try to make sense of the metaverse in other ways: it’s like losing one of your own, maybe, or a longing for the time when it really did seem like the whole thing might crack open and the rest of the world would understand what it feels like to mediate community, content and connection through an avatar in a 3D world – I mean, it beats being poked again in Facebook, seems to me.
Radar picked up what seemed to be the mood in back chat:
“What I see from all these companies is that they all wanted to drag real world, big money corporations into SL screaming and kicking, and in the process of trying to do this, they not only sold these guys the hype, they believed it themselves. I guess that’s good, because that way they weren’t intentionally lying about the ROI of going into SL for advertising purposes, but lying they were nonetheless. Even I can see that even now, and certainly during the hype phase, that there just were not the kind of numbers needed to be successful on the kind of scale companies like that needed to be successful on. It just was not going to happen.”
Who’s Got the Brains?
But there was a counter current: the one about Reuben being a pretty smart guy. Prok called him a genius, I think. This new stuff he’s doing, setting himself up to be a good old fashioned talent agent of virtual identities – now, that’s pretty sharp, maybe a ‘long future’ kind of thing but some day you might be looking at the Michael Ovitz of the Metaverse, or at least the Michael Ovitz before he went nuts and his ego blew his head off. And when he talks about stories, he’s touching something important, I just wish he hadn’t been so distracted with the back chat yesterday, because it sort of muffled what he was trying to say.
So if Reuben is so smart, and those agencies that brought in the brands, and if we’re all waving pitch forks and telling them to get out of town with their snake oil and charms, then who’s the fool? Us? The brands? The media?
See, I think everyone’s got a brain in there somewhere – my problem isn’t with individuals, generally, it’s with institutions, and herd mentalities, and sure, there is, and was a lot of that going around, especially with the Garnter Hype Cycle, which is one of those consultant things which are really expensive “Patently Obvious Dressed-Up PowerPoint Slides Constantly Referenced” that drives me nuts, just like Gladwell drives me nuts (please please someone de-meme Malcolm).
But I don’t understand this stuff about everything being over-hyped with agencies selling… well…they were over-selling I guess is the point (which, in Reuben’s defence, he admitted to being partly responsible for, which struck me as a reasonably honest thing to say). And I don’t understand it because it seems to partly ignore the realities of who was buying, and why, and how these things really work.
Agencies and Brands are Not the Same Thing
This is an ad man.
Ad men spend their client’s money. The way that they spend that money is by selling one big, large, research-appended, storyboarded and focus grouped strategy. Give me a couple million bucks and several months later, I’ll come back to you with something like “Coke is It” or “Just Do It”. Strange as it sounds – but that’s pretty much it. That’s the strategy. Everything else falls from that umbrella theme.
Your target audience becomes evident from it (and is based on researching them with all kinds of fancy tools and metrics and consumption data and buying habits and trend-spotting and whatever else). Your designs and tone and visuals come from it.
And what also comes from it is a budget – and the ad man traditionally takes a big cut out of where you PLACE your money. Usually a percentage of television spend or magazine ads or whatever. The rest of it: the interactive, and the coupons and the direct mail is actually extraordinarily messy for the ad man. It’s a hassle, they do it but don’t want to, and frankly it’s often an after-thought assigned to some junior at some little sister agency up in Minneapolis or something.
Now, the way this works is that the client – say it’s Nike – they have brand managers, and those guys and gals oversee the agencies, and make some decisions, and sit around on the set where the TV ad is being shot eating really expensive donuts and telling the director that the star of the commercial doesn’t look like they’re sweating enough, or their shoes aren’t gleaming the right way.
The thing is, in all of this, it’s hardly the president of Nike sitting around worrying about an investment in some campaign in Second Life. In 2007, Nike’s global ad budget was $1.7 BILLION dollars. You think that even if their spend in Second Life was a million dollars, say….that this really MATTERS to anyone? That it’s a central part of their plan to sell shoes?
It’s a line item, inside another line item, assigned to some junior guy, outsourced to a metaverse agency, who report in to someone in RESEARCH who’s in charge of metrics.
I’m exaggerating – but not by much. The client barely even knows they’re IN Second Life. The AGENCY barely knows. It’s a little bet, made on the side, or because someone saw Business Week and decided that it would be cool to check out, cut a check, bury it inside the larger interactive campaign that was linked to the Superbowl ad or the viral youTube thing that the guys out in California pitched over white wine and sushi when the VP of Marketing was out that way last talking about how much his son was in love with his Playstation.
It May Look Like Advertising but It Isn’t
OK. So that’s the usual agency way of the world. Someone comes up with the great idea to buy an ad on the boards at Madison Square Gardens. Or to build a little island in Second Life. Or to sponsor product give-aways in Habbo Hotel. Most of these decisions are one of two things: they’re either highly measured, and are fed into these very complex models for reach and brand impressions and cost per million. OR, it’s someone’s hot idea, and he’s the creative director and he’s, well, creative, so we’d better listen to him, or at least amuse him a little.
I mean – half the time the target audience for things like what happened in Second Life is NOT the end customer, believe it or not: it’s investors, it’s internal stakeholders, it’s distributors, it’s sales people, it’s HR.
Sometimes what looks like an ad campaign really isn’t: it’s a way for a company to get the word out that it’s a cool place to work. Or to communicate to impatient investors stuff like “don’t worry, we’re not some stodgy old company, we’re COOL, we’re in VIDEO games, we’re in the METAVERSE! so jack our share price up please, we promise to try not to be so yesteryear.”
Coke folks get happy in Cannes
Believe me. because this is true: vast sums of money have been spent on campaigns or programs or initiatives that never see the light of day, but were created solely so that the president of the company would have a cool slide to show at their annual meeting. Or, on the flip side – so that an ad agency would have something cool to say at the annual awards show in Cannes to their colleagues, because these people are incredibly competitive, and nothing says “I’m better” than “I’ve done something you HAVEN’T.”
Does that mean it didn’t work? No. It just means that we need to be careful assuming what the metrics were: very often, they’re not quite what they seem.
The Bigger Bet is Figuring Out How to Cover Your Butt When the Sky Is Falling
But back to Reuben. And Sibley for that matter, or Justin, or all the other people who were the early pioneers of virtual worlds: back to you, in fact. Because you’re interested in virtual worlds, and you get that there’s something ELSE going on. That this isn’t just about creating a game, or being broadcast to…but that the ecosystem of virtual worlds is becoming the largest platform for communal story-telling the world has ever known.
And you get the importance of that. And you know that what’s so disappointing, what’s so irritating, is that the brands came, and they went, and you just wish they had learned. That the broadcast era may be lingering around, but there’s a new co-reality: one in which the consumers not only consume those packaged brand things, but they also consume each OTHERS’ work. And aspire to be co-creators in their personal narratives.
And personally? I think Reuben and gang get that too. Creating virtual Elvis goods isn’t JUST about trying to attach known brands to 3D objects, it’s about creating environments for the fulfillment of aspirations – without questioning whether Elvis is a decent aspiration, I guess…but acknowledging that most of us WON’T be content creators, but sure want to be the authors of our own stories, and don’t mind a little help from the outside frankly, especially if it’s done well, and we can relate, and we can maintain some control over the narrative.
See – the brands may have been following a hype cycle, or spin, or inflated expectations. But I believe that they did so in part out of pure fear.
The ad man above was a success because he came up with those strategy things. Like “Think Small” was his. And all he had to do was slap it on a magazine ad, make a TV commercial, and go for lunch.
Now, he’d be bewildered even trying to FIND his audience. They’re not watching as much TV anymore, they’re all on youTube and Facebook and mySpace and text messaging their friends and playing computer games and whatever happened to the kinds of ratings you saw for the final episode of M*A*S*H anyways?
Too bad they didn’t allow ads on the back bleachers at the Inauguration – it was about as close as you come these days to a mass audience – and even the Superbowl is only as good as all the media coverage ABOUT the ads, because everyone’s getting a beer when they actually play on TV anyways.
The brand experiments of a few years ago weren’t failures. They were experiments that were attempts to understand and adapt to new realities: to figure out ways in which those traditional ad men could team up with interactive agencies and create stories that crossed platforms, that perhaps started to tackle the problem of the consumer who wants control over when, where and how to consume media, and, sure, to make damn sure that they didn’t miss out on the next big thing.
Was it hype? Sure. Did the results pay off for the sponsors? My bet is yes.
Did it benefit Second Life or virtual worlds in general? Well, yes, and no.
You tell me: name an innovative platform that truly benefited from the arrival of the brands, of the mass media? It wasn’t Nike that built Amazon. Usually, they’re just playing catch-up, or trying to get in early because they know it’s important, they have shareholders to impress, staff to excite, annual reports to fill – but the metrics aren’t sales, not the first time around, anyways.
Eventually, maybe they’ll get it – Lego World and Barbie World and Coke World, maybe, will each stake their claim to the metaverse. Who knows what it will look like – even their presence in games is evolving, and not making sense, again – early days, even Google was trying to get into the act for a while there.
But their arrival and departure was a badge of honour for virtual worlds, in my opinion. Brands come to new technologies, they fail, they create chaos in their wake, and the people left behind generally just get on with it, plug away with innovations that aren’t just new bells and whistles but are, potentially, game changers. The brands will come back because when the game is changed they have no choice. And they’ll adapt, they’ll make their own games, or they’ll keep plugging away at Superbowl ads, and we’ll keep waiting to buy a Coke in Ironforge.
[...] Dusan responded to some of the conversation about the media guys and the coming and going of the corporations in SL with a very interesting blog post. [...]
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. Fashion obviously has some pretty direct relevance in both worlds, even if we aren’t all 7’1″ in RL.
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.
I hope you will read every word in my blog about this which explains the problem in depth:
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…
Mo Hax is a PERFECT exemplar of the mindset that I’m describing as the very hobbling problem here.
>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.
Wonderful article. I think, to be honest, it isn’t really an incredibly complicated answer we’re looking for.External Corporations with an interest in marketing residents will not work. Second Life an impractical platform in which to market. Why? Because the technology is too outdated. The grid could not scale with the growth. We can’t have more than 30 people on a sim without it weeping for mercy. What corporation wants to market to 40 residents at a time? Not to mention the instabilities and bugs that still plague the technicians. We, as contractors don’t have the ability to really market our clients, their builds, their projects or in-world experiences because the world is so big that it’s nearly impossible to solicit enough people to make even a modest investment worthwhile. We don’t have access to Message of the Day or any way to tie our efforts directly to the users of the platform. Linden Lab does, and in the future they will likely conclude the they are really the only viable contractors with arms reaching much further than any resident contractors.
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.
It’s really disappointing to read Prokofy Neva on this blog. Please, stop the hate – ban Prokofy Neva.
Aww don’t ban Prokofy. He has the biggest balls of them all. He does spew hate all across he blog-o-sphere, but I think deep down He has a big ocean of warm LOVE. His hate is there to amplify an individuals belief in love as the answer. The post is about VWorld Branding. Prokofy has one of the strongest of all the SL Brands, a very well known individual. Maybe Coke and Nike will adopt the Prokofy style. “F**king drink this drink, you f**king geeky communist technotard. If you dont drink this f**king drink, you are just proving how far removed from reality you are. All my good friends drink this f**king drink, so it MUST be the best drink in the world. Buy Prokofyade now! (can be addictive, and harmful to ones self-belief, drink responsibly)”.
I don’t really click on ads or make any money from advertising. I know that secondlife is a beautiful thing. For a company to make money here will take many months of hard workings, and they must bring something of value to people who are liking secondlife. The platform is a bit wonky to compete with the usual video game product like quakewars or sony home, but it already has a big userbase of people who really really like it. Ads for outside stuff is not the way forward, Ads for the next super cool RP sim are one example of what could work. Or Ads for all of the Buddist groups in SL. This has all been said before. Noones cooming to SL to look at a bunch of AdBoards, they wont stay long if thats all there is to look at. LL knows this, that is why the keep the website and client virtually ad-free. They should get more adventurous with their website, and maybe help some of the less business savvy customers to improve thier chances of making good (and sustainable) business decisions. What LL still has (freedom of 3d space use) is very beautiful, a bit like gold. Except this gold is handed out as the form of lead.