More notes from the Virtual World Conference in NYC. Need I say - My mistakes, just notes, just my opinions and not those of my employer.
Roger Holzberg, Disney.
Greg Verdino, Digitas
Randal Moss, American Cancer Society
Paul Hemp, Harvard Business Review
Joel Greenberg, Electric Sheep
Roger Holzberg, Disney.
Disney. Started one for cancer patients, the kind of world. Now we have one, starts wth a map, we want kids to be able to walk it for real.
We heard we needed user-generated content. We started with our own. A simulation photo safari, if you crash into alligators and elephants you don't get points. You get points if you take good pictures. The credits are redeemable.
Pirates of the Carribean,multi uper game, 8 people can blow the cr*p out of othere groups. You win points for how well it's done.
We realize quickly that our most innovative games had a duration of play for a certain period of time, and then we needed to give them to tools make their own stuff. Grownups don't know what they want.
Guest rooms. you can buy guest rooms with your credits. We figured if we gave them a tool like a pair of dice, what would they do. They made basketball and baseball. So we gave them bases and there were 30 leagues of baseball games going on in the private rooms, it had its own season just like real baseball.
Our objective was to hit a million kids, we hit it pretty quickly, other parts of our company wanted attention, we did a Herbie promotion when that movie came out. We build a web-based game that spit out codes to get for your own room in VMK. You could only win this stuff if you went outside of VMK. Just so you know, your brand will get mucked with. We're lucky we were allowed. This is a Snow White Room with non-snow white stuff, you have to be OK with that.
We had over 100,000 kids in our everest event over one weekend. Some virtual green flip flops sold for over $1K on ebay.
Quests happen inside VMK, they also happen outside of VMK at Disneyland.com, Disneycruise.com, WDW.com. And then there's a wider circle: our Theme parks, our Cruises, our Vacation Clubs. You can play a quest in real life and get a secret code that will deliver you a rare item in your virtual world.
I've heard so much about how things live in the VW, and that drives Real World. We've turned it upside down. We have more exposure in the Real World for our Virtual community. Thus begins another chapter in our vacation cycle.
Nobody has said that VWs are marketing, but they require marketing, and how do you get that investment from your own company? From the marketing team. We had to go back to them after we built it for them and say, "now you have to market this".
Moss: Relay for Life in Second Life. A fundraiser run by volunters. Someone paid $2,000 for the pink cancer society car, there's only one. We raised over $40K and spent just $1200 buying our real estate, I'd like to thank my volunteers. Word of mouth is spreading. When you build an amazing and positive user experience it gets around. Just like I love New Balance Shoes. We have Second Life Relay for Life fanatics. They love it and we've designed it specifically for them.
If you don't know what your desired outcomes are, don't do it. My outcomes are fundraising, awareness, traffic, downloads.
Hemp: vw marketing. Should you seek an existing world or make your own? What's your aim? building your brand or selling your product? 3d spaces will fundamentally change the nature of B2C ecommerce. A shift from making online purchases, a single consumer interacting with a 2d space. We'll evolve to going shopping online, you do it as a social experience. Groups of people interacting with one another.alot of what this conference is about is expanding the boundaries beyond the virtual world. How can you dissolve the boundaries between virtual and real worlds? Import from RL into virtual life, or vice versa. Take the same product, bring it back transformed and market it in the real world.
How can you use your brand to create a social experience? Use your brand to enable people to establish relationships with one another.
What ethical constraints do you set for yourself on the gathering and use of digital information? You can track every move. A clerk could appear and answer questions they know you have because they have been eavesdropping. you could make your sales avatar mimic the appearance and moves of the customer, suddenly and automatically tailor its behavior to yours making it seem more interesting and persuasive. But what does the consumer think? Don't let it come back to bite you.
Do you target the flesh and blood consumer or the avatar?
Verdino. let's discuss that more. Joel?
Joel: I recently joined the Electric Sheep company and I'm building out an ad network for virtual worlds, starting with Second Life. I think the answer to your question got people talking but now it's an impediment to where we all want to get to. To traditional marketing folks they say this is nonsensical, it's just a game. So instead let's reframe the question. What do those people want and need? We need to do consumer research so we can understand them so that when we go to the clients we can talk to them in their language so they can see that it fits with their marketing goals. How do we go beyond reach frequency, which is how media's been purchsed for 40 years, to how do we measure engagement? What is the value of someone spending an hour in my place in the virtual world? The whole marketing industry is struggling with it.
You could take an analog of a real event you're currently doing, and do a mixed-reality event. If you have real-world fanbase or membership, it's easy conceptually to understand how virtual worlds enhance that membership base. If you have an ongoing reason to be there, buy a sim. If not, rent. Read Henry Jenkins "Convergence Culture", from the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. You need to recognize when you're talking to a boomer vs. an Xer vs. a millenial. Millenials undersatnd the participatory nature, they understand participation whether it's 2d or 3d. "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss and Hamill (sp?) is a good read.
Holzberg. Girl Scouts of America has an amazing MySpace page. Wholesome America is embracing it. It's hard for us to reach tweens. the 80 minutes per day on our VW, the exit research shows that those kids believe a visit to a Disney Theme park is Cool. This is the only channel we have to talk to them, and it's working. We don't care who those avatars are, if they're playing it and spending time there it works.
You won't find a more skittish organization than the nation's largest health nonprofit. We had someone cal and say I hear there's nudity in Second Life. Is that OK?
I asked - do you know where our Home office is? It's by Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta, it's got strip clubs. I wouldn't put Relay for Life right next to them. When we do events, they're separate, but I can't control what goes on in the world, and to expect that you can control what goes on the virtual world is pure lunacy. Unless you want to be alone there. We set our stuff to PG. you can't stop it in the Real World either.
Hemp: I'd be nervous about losing control of your brand too. My daughters just discovered Webkinz. If they know about Webkinz or NeoPets they will see the power that comes with interacting with other people in virtual social spaces.
Holzberg. We vere given the green light to make it market-driven, not marketing-driven. We had the opportunity to listen. If you're going to go into the space, make it market-driven and not marketing driven.
Panelist: Beyond Second Life, there's SciWorld (sp?) in South Korea. It has 3d on one side and 3d on the other side. They match up extremely well. The future will be about both.
Panelist: marketers want to know, whose credit card is going to be making the purchase? And the worlds won't be giving that information up because of privacy policies.
Hemp: in something like World of Warcraft which never comes up in this conference for some reason - but if you could market to a particular character type that would be meaningful. In real life, market to all those avatars.
Holzberg: A collectible card with a redemmable card inworld, those numbers don't lie. You prove them out with prototypes. When someone wins a card in the real world, they can use it in the virtual world.
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