Darren Herman

While doing some work in the office today, I had the chance to listen to Greg Verdino and David Armano babble about advertising, beer, and Second Life. Both of these characters (I say that with a smile on my face as I consider Verdino a friend of mine!) recorded the podcast originally in an office, then as the cleaning woman came in, they had to move to a conference room. It’s a fairly raw podcast but nonetheless, has quite a bit of meat to it.

If you’ve ever worked with Greg, you know that he has the gift of gab. I love it. In this case, 30 minutes uncut.  He’s extremely knowledgeable in many different areas and brings the agency world a perspective on technology from having worked in startups… which is very valuable to any ad agency. In this case, it’s Digitas.

Verdino and Amano covered Second Life for the majority of the podcast and I’m pretty much in agreement with everything they touched upon. I guess the underlying thought that the three of us agree on is that there is no doubt that Second Life or any virtual world is extremely important, however, until there is a critical mass of a mainstream audience into the virtual world (or metaverse, used interchangeably), it just doesn’t have the numbers. Verdino talks about the Starwood A-Loft integration and says how it’s absolutely beautiful…. except it’s vacant. Every time he visits or shows a client, it’s a ghost town.

If you’ve got a spare 30 minutes and want to listen to two extremely well versed advertising executives, certainly check them out here. I have a dedicated area of this blog to Virtual Worlds and you can read about it here. There is a fairly relevant post here.

BTW:Â Miller Light… guys, come’on