Second Life is one of the few online advertising and marketing medium that are chosen due to its popularity on the internet. Second Life had possibly turned from a virtual world to a parallel world because they have their own economy, seven million inhabitants and growing and there is actually newspaper agencies in real life that had created a similar online version dedicated specially for covering events in Second Life, an example is Reuters. Companies like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adidas and Toyota saw the potential it had and jumped into the bandwagon by utilising Second Life's wide participation of virtual visitors to pull in the hype and also bring awareness to their products in the real world in a different and more creative way. An example is the launch of Vista/Office 2007 on 30th January 2007 in Second Life .
Event billboard in Second Life
Image Source: http://www.crayonville.com/blog/?p=165
Their marketing team placed billboards around different places within second Life to encourage avatars (virtual visitors) in the game to join in the launch and watch the free concert. This is a great concept as it allows people who are not able to visit their launch in real Life get together in a virtual environment to celebrate the launch of a product as long as you've got internet and is a registered Second Life user anywhere around the world.
Unfortunately as successful as it seems, the bubble of marketing in Second Life had burst according to this article by Wagner James Au in GIGAOM . But with the creativeness of the Second Life inhabitants and also large corporations utilising the resources available, there are new ways that advertising in Second Life is being done.
I just read an online article at InformationWeek about how a real-Life publicly financed hospital in San Diego which will cost $810 million when ready had open its doors to virtual visitors in Second Life way before it's official launch in 2011 which is 3 years from now. While the real-Life hospital is still under construction in San Diego, anyone with a Second Life avatar can experience for themselves and tour the Palomar West Medical Campus of its facilities and some of their amenities.
With CISCO as their technology partner in the project, they are able to show visitors how the hospital is going to utilise RFID bracelets as not only a patient tracking device but also be able to guide the patient automatically to the right floor in an elevator based on their appointment information programmed in their bracelets. I'd say this is a splendid idea as feedbacks from visitors would not only help in the future usability of the systems but also allow them to test run the concepts that they would like to utilise before the actual system is completed.
I would say this concept had revived the interest in concepts of virtual worlds like Second life as even Google and Yahoo had decided to create their own versions of Second Life according to an article on TechCrunch. With the participation from both this big names in internet searching ,perhaps this will be another medium that will change how advertising and marketing is done in the future.
3 comments:
7 million users in Second Life is a relatively small population don't you think. If you split them into regions where they came from, it means that advertising on Second Life will be limited to truly International Brands only, whereas advertising for region specific brands will not be as effective. In addition, the target advertisers will also be rather limited, considering there are not a lot of companies out there who have achieved the grand international status as Coca Cola.
In any social networking virtual world like Second Life would be able to give a level advertising platform for big and small companies. Even though bigger companies with bigger budget will attract a bigger audience as they are able to produce more hype, I believe with creativity anything can be advertised in Second Life. Perhaps it is true that 7 million is not a big number, but Second Life wasn’t built to be an advertising platform in the first place. It was the appeal of having different people from different parts of the world that convinced and brought in brands to advertise in the game itself. With Google and Yahoo creating their own virtual worlds, we might get to see more creative advertising that may be introduced in their completed system in the near future.
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