IGA Worldwide, the pioneering in-game advertising company (I am the Founder) has signed a multi-title deal with the worlds biggest video game publisher, Electronic Arts (ERTS).  The first title we will be delivering dynamic advertising into is Battlefield 2142, a futuristic combat game slated for release in mid-October.

This is a fantastic day for us and we look forward to carrying the momentum!  If you want to see some awesome footage of BF2142, check out this Youtube video.

Original Press Release

Dont’ know what to make of it just yet, but this is pretty big news.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060829/sfth094.html?.v=50

Remember PointCast? The PointCast Network used push technology to send information to a users computer and received enormous press coverage in the mid 90s. However, it’s making a resurgence, though not as “PointCast.”

The Apple OS X Dashboard widgets remind me of PointCast. There are significant differences between widgets and PointCast, but the underlying meaning is the same… separate applications that push data to the end user after the initial request.

Are we going to see a resurgence of the PointCast Network?

Wired Magazine’s September issue (9/2006) includes a reader “rant + rave” that says the following: “As a fad for the young, MySpace will fizzle out within two years, just as a new nightclub burns brightly with all the cool people until the mundanes discover it. If old media wants to keep the young dazzled with its online clubs, it’ll need a virtual velvet rope to keep out the unhip, including parents, teachers, and those over-the-hill 35 year-olds fishing for 18-year olds.” (William McCarthy)

I agree partially with what William discusses above. I like the MySpace vs. nightclub comparison. In the nightclub industry, you can only be “hot” for so long - it’s a rule of thumb. Owners of hot restaurants and nightclubs will generally close after they are the #1 club for the summer and go and open up somewhere else under a new name. The reason for this is that the “elite” or “trendsetters” do not want to keep frequenting the same place year after year. What will generally happen is that the “trendsetters” will find the place, party for a summer, then the name will spread to the masses and it’ll become the mass place to go until that fizzles out. Just think of Pangaea and Serafina here in New York… those were the hot-spots.

MySpace according to McCarthy “was” the hot-spot. I like his analogy here. The trendsetters are probably up in arms that 55+ million people have registered as well, so they are out scouting new social networks. However, my question is, can you take 55+ million people away from Myspace as it’s not the “hot club” anymore? Probably not, but I do like his analogy.

We’ve seen about a dozen major brands set foot into Linden Lab’s Second Life.  Retailer American Apparel, Major League Baseball, Toyota Scion, a handful of major label artists including Duran Duran, and various other ubiquitous brands have gotten a Second Life. For each of these integrations into the virtual world, they achieved quite a bit of PR exposure (more so than most campaigns receive) but there is going to come a time in the very near future where editors at magazines and blogs will want to know more than just about the deployment within a virtual world… they will want to know campaign metrics.

** Note, I’m a huge proponent of metaverse marketing.  I have huge respect for all of the companies listed below and they are doing some things that are bananas.  The point of this post is to get people thinking about the metrics about metaverse marketing and showing them to the press to see what works and what does not.

Many of the integration shops such as Electric Sheep Company, Millions of Us, and Rivers Run Red are fantastic at developing the assets for virtual world integrations but when dealing with advertisers and their agencies, it’s a bit more than just delivering really beautiful and realistic assets. Advertisers are using these metaverses as a way to communicate with their audience, be it a retail shop, a baseball stadium, or automobiles driving around, but what numbers are being derived from these campaigns? If a brand is going to commit $20,000 to developing an in-world integration, how do you know if they recouped that amount back from the campaign? How much value is derived from each integration?  How much awareness did an advertiser attract from the campaign?  Purchase consideration?

With diminishing returns eventually from the PR exposure of in-world campaigns, in-world value creation is going to face increasing pressure. How many people interacted with the store, bought clothing, talked about the brand, viewed the concert, clicked to get more information, etc? This list can go on for pages, but these are all questions that I’d love to wrap my head around when looking at metaverse campaigns.

Different companies are developing ways to measure around their integrations and I’d love to see the data on this.  Are in-world campaigns worth the dollar commitment?  With around 8,000 concurrent residents of Second Life at any given time, and with 250k users logging in within the last 60 days, is this medium worth the five to six figure spend for brand integration?  Lets see the numbers.

With the pace of innovation increasing weekly, it’s pretty hard for anyone to really catch up or be cutting edge for more than a month or so. One of my favorite bands, 3 Days Grace, is out and about on a national tour and I wanted to see when they were playing New York City as I’d love to go and see them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see a NYC tourdate on their website, but I did see an amazing page [for a band] that has a bunch of “web 2.0″ type mashups. Check it out for yourself. The page includes a map that fans can click on and enter their information regarding which show they’ll be attending, a social network around who is going to each show (with pictures on the main tour date page), and other elements of interactivity.

Zomba (record label) has done a great job of providing this service to 3 Days Grace - this is one of the first times I’ve seen any band do anything that allows fans to interact with their website that is not on a message board or chat room.

On a side note: I was on the way back from a 4 hour journey one afternoon and was listening to XM Satellite Radio. It happend to be a talk show and 3 Days Grace were discussing their upcoming self titled debut album (2003). I had never heard of the band before nor heard their hit song(s) but the interview was really intriguing. I decided to listen to all 45 minutes of the interview and then listen to the tracks that they played after their segment was over. Turns out, not only did I like the style of the band during the interview, but totally dug their music. I then went to the nearest store when I arrived back home in Saratoga Springs and bought their album in the local Borders. Turns out that radio promotion works…. who would have thought?

Do you play Dodgeball? If you are laughing because the last time you played was in elementary school, then you’re not the only one. Come on out and join a team in the nextNY League! We’re looking for entrepreneurs, media, advertising and technology folks to come out and have a fantastic time and network… and of course, throw balls at each other!

I’m heading up the league for the fall and invite everyone to join! It’s going to be fantastic time. We had some dodgeball events earlier this year and they went really well!

If you have a team of 8 that you’d like to play with or are flying solo and would like to be assigned to a team, just let me know. More details coming soon!

I’m pretty wrapped up in my current project to start something new, but have been sitting on an idea for quite some time and I believe now is the time to act upon it.  Unfortunately, I’m going to have to watch from the sideline for this one.

The idea is about television pilots.  Studios and private investors pay some serious cash to film these pilots but 99% of them sit on the shelves due to many different reasons.  Why don’t we take the catalog of these pilots and enable them over the web and allow the world to view?

This is fantastic for the television industry as the pilots are currently collecting dust in a storage warehouse somewhere and now, we can dust them off and monetize them.  The business model around these pilots would be a subscription fee, on demand fee, or advertising model. 

Remember, there is an audience for each pilot out there.  Chances are they were shelved for not building enough viewers, but at that time they were being tested, they did have at least some viewers….. 

Also, pilots were cancelled for many reasons, so there is bound to be a television pilot that is going to do very well when brought back, that it will become a prime time show.

This idea has been sitting with me for quite some time but I certainly want to see it exist in the marketplace so that’s my motivation for sharing.  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or leave comments with your thoughts.  I’d love to hear what you think…

Scion, the progressive brand from Toyota has entered the virtual world as the first automotive advertiser according to Millions of Us founder, Reuben Steiger.  Reuben made the announcement today right before the lunch break at the Second Life Community Convention here in San Francisco.

Steiger even had a silver Scion at the Second Life Community Convention and drove it around the parking lot in front of a small crowd.  He beeped a horn - and voila, the Scions were released into the virtual world.

The Scion apparently has been dropped all around the grid of Second Life and users can drive it around and interact with it.  There are some current automotive designs in Second Life including a Dodge Viper, however, this is the first sanctioned campaign by an automaker.

I am attending the Second Life Community Convention this weekend in San Francisco and recently listened to a panel based on Real-Life Business in Second Life. SL resident Bolliver OddFellow who runs Infinite Vision Media made an extremely bold statement regarding, “advertisers and marketers must throw out everything they know about advertising and start all over when planning for the virtual world.�

I fundamentally disagree with OddFellow’s statement.  Marketing is built around the 4 P’s which hasn’t changed for the last 40 years. E. Jerome McCarthy wrote his classic book called Basic Marketing which has been a staple for brand strategists and agencies across the world. Product, Place, Price, and Promotion must all be taken into account in the virtual world. These four pillars are in every advertising and marketing campaign. The remark in which Bolliver OddFellow made earlier today totally threw away this notion of the 4Ps.

I would say that we need to be especially careful on how we plan campaigns in the virtual world to everyone’s point on the panel (including my friends, Steiger and Verbeck).  Second Life has around 530,000 early adopters who are taking part in forming this amazing world and each individual contributes greatly how the world will play out for the future. Brands and their respective agencies must acknowledge that planning and executing a campaign in the virtual world may be different than real life, but it still uses the same science and history that we’ve used to plan hundreds of billions of dollars of campaigns in the real world.