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 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.
Why would people lead fake lives? Because they can't get what they want out of real life. Take for example the NeoVictorian/Steampunk SecondLife town of Babbage. The people who have the interest and put in the work to make the place doubtfully have the resources (read $$$) to make a sustainable real life town with a Victorian asthetic both in architecture and social etiquette. So they made their fanatasy in a video game. Why would they stand for having that fantasy marred by the very aspects of real life they are seeking to escape from? Sure you might view them as lame, but why does that excuse the disruption of a fantasy they go to such lengths to pursue?
We are all just people.
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...
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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!