Darren Herman

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.