Slashdot Mirror
Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life?
Vary writes "The LA Times is running a story today saying that marketers are pulling out of Second Life, primarily because — surprise, surprise — the 'more than 8 million residents' figure on the game's Web site is grossly inflated. Also, as it turns out, the virtual world's regular visitors — at most 40,000 of them online at any time — are not only disinterested in in-world marketing, but actively hostile to it, staging attacks on corporate presences such as the Reebok and American Apparel stores. The companies aren't giving up on virtual worlds altogether, though, but moving on to games like There, Gaia Online and Entropia Universe. The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.' What company wouldn't want to be in on that action?"
One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia
I am pretty sure if they weren't supplied for free, that would also be the case in real life.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I think defacing a commercial virtual presense is just as immature as a real one, even if the damage done really isn't. I know people get childish on the Internet, but that's pretty lame.
I've never quite understood the point of SL and these other listed sites. What do you do on them? Are they like some merging of ICQ/Myspace/Facebook into a 3d game (or some approximation)?
Maybe I'm just not nerd enough anymore..
I guess it has become a mystic revelation to certain marketers that there is more than gross audience numbers to the success of a marketing campaign.
And that maybe marketing sportsware or fashionware to geeks playing Second Life all day, instead of going outside and doing some sports or going to real life parties, may just not be the most cost-effective idea?
One of the prime reasons people are playing second life is because they are so damn fed up with First Life! And advertisers are a big thing that you can be fed up in the first place. Guess what, if you import to Second Life things that were what you hate in First Life already, people are going to be hostile to them?
Go back marketing soap to soccer moms, marketers. Do a favor to yourself and the rest of society.
Near the end of the article: "Consulting firms that were set up to bring brands into Second Life are busy helping clients explore other worlds."
The best way to profit from a gold rush is to sell tools to the miners ... as Seattle discovered in 1897
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
...to realize that people would rather have sex than see advertising in their fantasy lives?
When corporations invade a community's environment for the purpose of marketing, of course they aren't going to elicit a positive reaction. How could any reasonable person expect that?
First Life has absolutely amazing photorealistic graphics, but the game is as boring as hell- you have to spend roughly 5 out of 7 days doing gold-farming-style activities just to get enough money to buy the more interesting stuff; sometimes even just to get by.
And that's after spending years doing training in the random (usually boring) place you started the game in and being stuck with a load of boorish cretins. Supposedly this is to teach you how the game works, but after you complete it, you realise it's not that useful at all.
The one bit of good news is that you don't have to buy your own genitalia- the bad news is that it's hard, if not impossible, to upgrade...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Overinflated numbers, hostile fans, just regular stupidity?
Second life is real life with anonymity. Don't you think that breeds a culture that is more interested in sexual exploits and penal attacks (I mean the flying penises, not a second sexual action) than wholesome family fun where people can buy items.
The biggest problem is Second life tries to build an economy based off of real world money. It just doesn't work, people don't want to pay money to get virtual money. On the other hand World of Warcraft has an economy based off of fake money earned from doing spending time in the game. This way advertising in WoW could work (it shouldn't be done but could be there).
So someone please explain how advertisers would even start to invest in this idea with out looking before they leaped. It's an obvious bait and switch deal (high amounts of users, low amounts of ACTIVE users).
Sony's trying to get into the Second life front with Playstation Home, then expecting people to buy all sorts of virtual wares? I can't imagine that's going to turn out good for them too. That doesn't mean the virtual world idea is horrible. The problem is the cost of the virtual world has to be floated somewhere, and consumers are NOT the place to get it in a Second Life style enviroment. SL had a good idea at one point of charging people for land, and that could work, but nickle and diming them for everything or expecting people to spend huge amounts of time designing objects doesn't make a online experience for any company.
Instead give a monthly stipend so people can do stuff with it, have a couple LARGE add ons (more room/s) and charge the advertisers pay for the servers. There needs to be a reason for people to log on other than random hookups and spending there money. That's what the mall is for, though I still can't find the random hook up store.
Around the same time political bloggers caught "Bush '08"-tag-wearing vandals defacing former senator John Edwards' Second Life headquarters with excrement and covering his photo in blackface.
What actually happened?
What does it mean?
When you buy an "island" (a server) from Linden Labs, what you get is configured to only allow *you* to create objects on it. In addition, unless you deliberately set out to make it happen, nothing in Second Life can be damaged, destroyed, defaced, or in any way modified except by the owner. Even if you do allow people to create objects, you get to set a time limit beyond which they vanish. THe only think you can effect are objects marked as being as being subject to normal physics, which has to be done deliberately, and pretty much the only "physical" objects in most places in SL are the avatars themselves.
If the people who built the Kerry site mistakenly turned on building for other people without setting a time limit, and didn't keep someone there to monitor it, then they did the equivalent of renting space in a mall, putting up posters, setting out leaflets, and walking away with the doors unlocked... and they were a lot safer doing that than they'd have been in RL.
There's no feces to smear on things. You can create a picture of them and post them on top, like a second layer of posters. There's no way to remove anything anyone put there, or break it.
So... someone came along and put up new posters, with *pictures* of feces on them. Which (if they had any sense) the Kerry people would have removed, permanently, as soon as they returned. After making sure they had some pictures to show everyone what jerks Bush supporters were.
If they'd done the same thing in RL they'd have been lucky if they didn't get everything movable stolen as well. And canned from the campaign. No, there's much less chance of anything seriously unpleasant happening to your marketing campaign in SL than in RL.
The biggest problem I've seen with people marketing in SL is simply not understanding what they're doing.
For example, objects in SL are infinitely and freely replicable by the creator. If you set up a website online, advertising your product, you typically let people download screen savers and branded games and things for free. If you're a car company, you don't charge people money for the driving game and desktop wallpaper and AOL icons... you want people to walk out with them and keep them around. At car shows you give people freebies, you don't charge money for the toy cars and tee-shirts with your logo on them.
So I went to this auto maker's island. They wanted you to pay the equivalent of a dollar to buy a "car" in SL. That's a bunch of painted boxes configured to use the "driving" code built into SL. A car, mind you, that costs them no more than the wallpaper and mini driving game you could download at their website... and cost less to create than the model cars in that driving game. No thanks, I'll save that buck for an iTunes download. So their thousands of dollars for renting that island in SL is all thrown away because they tried to recover the costs by charging the people they're advertising to for what they'd be giving away as a freebie online or at the auto show.
You see this again and again. One electronics store wanted you to buy "computers" and "iPods" from them... all of which are just boxes with photos pasted on the sides. Another company was charging money for a logo T-shirt. What this kind of product is, is basically an uploaded copy of their logo, positioned so that when you "wore" it it showed up on your chest... they didn't even bother creating a "cloth" texture, stitches, folds, or any of the baked-in lighting effects that hobbyists making levels and skins for video games are used to doing. The T-shirts they give away at trade shows cost approximately infinity times as much to reproduce.
Meanwhile, the average person selling clothes in-game with a monthly budget that *might* pay for the typical
Quelle surprise. Marketers in the real world always and everywhere have to pay for the ability to get their message out because at bottom people are reluctant to host it and reluctant to see it. People do not like advertising.
This is exactly what you would expect if there are no consequences to acting on that dislike, unless you are a marketer whose self-esteem depends on fooling yourself that people like what you do for a living.
Bill Hicks:
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."
Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!
The parent poster is not funny, he's ignorant, rude, and narrow minded.
Calling SL a game is like calling myspace a "first person shooter".
SL is a 3d social environment that gives the "residents" the ability to interact and create anything they choose.
-zariok-
Being a LONG TERM Resident of Second Life I think I can shine some more light on this subject then the LA Times is able to.
Yes, it's true, the Resident Numbers shown on the Website are over-inflated, by about 7.5 million I would say, and even then I would consider it suspicious. Linden Lab began allowing FREE ACCT's over a year ago, and many of the regular Residents of course decided they wanted a FREE Alternate Acct to mess with. Since there is not active way to track these FREE ACCT's, (LL doesn't track based on IP and MAC Address) there is no real way to tell how many of these FREE ACCTs are for already established Residents and how many are for New Residents coming into the world.
Yes, it's also true, there's a large part of the Resident Community that get their kicks out of Virtual Sex. This is true with just about any Online World though, so there's no real big news here.
Yes, it's also true as well, that there is a SMALL contingent of Residents that vehemently oppose the commercialization of the Second Life world. These groups actively seek out Commercial establishments and hold regular protests. The LA TIMES is incorrect those in assuming that MOST of the Community is against these Commercial establishments. The thing is, with the Commercial establishments, they usuall BUY their OWN ISLAND, therefore, if you don't want to go there, you don't have to. Most of the Resident Community might visit these Commercial Islands once or twice, but after that they figure, "So what else is new?" It's not that they don't like the Commercialization, its just simple that there's nothing new about them. Just another store to visit, big deal, we've been to stores before, and quite frankly, a Car Dealership showing new models in SL doesn't really do it for many people. Now if say someone like Netflix or Blockbuster came to SL, and rented movies, then you would see people flocking to them. It's a matter of the right product for the Community, not that the Community doesn't want them there. On a side note to this example, there are DVD stores in Second Life that are renting DVD's. This has been brought to the attention of Linden Lab, but they feel until the MPAA actually tells them to remove the offending material, then they don't really have to do anything about the illegality of this.
Which brings us to the REAL REASON the Commercial avenues are disappearing in Second Life. It's got little to do with the "assumptions" given in the LA TIMES, it has everything to do with a very unstable World and the amount of BUGS that continue to plague the world. A day doesn't go by that I don't hear from someone that has spent a considerable amount of Linden Dollars (in-world currency) and when they went to put the product out on their property, it simply disappeared and never returned. Linden Lab of course, says they can do nothing about reimbursing the people for this major issue, yet provide no fix to this issue that has now lasted over three months. Not only that, but it was recently divulged in-world by the BUG TEAM members that BUG REPORTS that don't have REPRODUCABLE steps are ignored because, as they put it, they just don't have time to try and figure those out. Yet, the bug list still has bugs listed over 4 years ago on it. The BUG TEAM also has decided it would be a good idea to let the Community VOTE on which bugs will be fixed first. I would say if you like BUG tracking and coding, a great place to work would be at Linden Lab, since they are still waiting to be told by the Resident Community what BUGS to fix first. Of course, Linden Lab has failed to provide some venue in which to "vote" on these issues, so I guess the BUG people are just taking the summer off. Also, Linden Lab continues to add more and more enhancements to Second Life, which continues to increase the stress on the GRID. A month or so ago, Linden Lab introduced a new enhancement called WINDLIGHT to the world. It's purpose was to make the worlds SKY more realistic and "prettier". Once the enhancement was added, peopl
I think the problem is that companies have a tendency to view people strictly as consumers, which I suppose is what they have to do if they want to survive. These "consumers" have portions of their lives that don't involve spending money though, and that's just as true in second life. Unless the company's product enhances the social aspect of SL somehow, or provides something actually useful in the gameplay, I don't see people wanting to view what is effectively a dull marketing campaign unless they're already interested in the product. How many people go out looking for pages of banner ads?
As an active Second Life 'resident', I'd actually be happy to see marketers give up on it. Perhaps they could get rid of the ad farms too, although I wouldn't hold my breath on either. SL in a lot of ways has strong parallels to the web as I remember it in the Mosaic/early Netscape years... The client's not really finished, network bandwidth hasn't quite caught up with its demands yet, effective advertising mechanisms aren't really well defined, and the emphasis on user-supplied content initially confuses many who are just looking for something to play with. I have a feeling that we're going to be using SL or something like it in 10 years or so though, in the same way that we're using web browsers now. Marketers are no doubt thinking along these lines.
GPL: Free as in will
who could possibly believe there are more than 40,000 NoLife "players" out there?
even that is a exaggeration. I've preached this since its inception, Second Life is dumb.
It truly is an animated AOL chatroom. It's full of boring people who don't get to have sex.
As they are boring people, why is everyone paying so much attention to them?
It has no plot, no purpose, no rules, no point.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Marketers are well known for paying out more money than they take in. Yes.
The price of some things would rise. The price of other things would drop. The customer would save money on average. Advertising costs aren't swallowed by a company, they're passed on to their customers.