Millions of Us, a Sausalito, Calif. agency that specializes in virtual worlds, was launched in May, 2006 and is having success now with campaigns that are taking advertising in a new direction. Advertisers first played banner ads in virtual worlds, but they weren’t popular. Today advertisers are developing innovative campaigns that incorporate the brands in stories that take place in the virtual worlds that users can engage in. Video is being used to broadcast the stories, not just in the virtual worlds, but on YouTube and other user-generated sites that have become a new marketplace for the products being advertised. Jeff Freedman, director, business development at Millions of Us, who has started a company office in New York, discusses the medium and two of the agency’s campaigns in this week’s iChat.
iSPOT: Everyone knows Second Life, but what other virtual worlds are out there?
Freedman: First of all the space evolved very quickly. The difference between Second Life and the others that have developed is the level of immersiveness, whether it’s three dimensional or two dimensional. Second Life is a totally immersive 3-D environment, it requires a client download while now a number of virtual worlds–especially those that target the younger demographic–are 2-D, they’re Flash based and there’s no download, which allows for much quicker scalability. A lot of them aren’t as robust as Second Life but the activity is kind of unbelievable.
iSPOT: As far as advertising in virtual worlds goes, is a lot of it contextual product placements?
Freedman: The advertising we do is not about product placement and banners, it’s about creating a very engaging experience around the brand, building a community and telling a story with the brand at the center and enabling some indirect action. We’re creating an experience around the brand that improves the quality of the experience of the community.
iSPOT: How is video used in this context?
Freedman: We can use the platform of a Second Life series as a back lot for filming. You can create machinima that is video shot into a virtual world and tell a story using the film that’s shot. It’s a powerful opportunity for advertisers to take a commercial shot in virtual worlds and put them in other sites like YouTube and other user-generated sites so a community forms around the commercial. From an advertiser’s perspective the model is changing pretty dynamically. TV spots are push, they send you content. In a virtual world people look for the content you’re playing so it makes a big difference. Toyota had a video in World of Warcraft that was uploaded into YouTube and is now on TV. We’re doing a campaign for Scion, creating a story of this place we created in Second Life called Scion City. We’re distributing the content out to the public and people have the opportunity to fill in the gaps with their own user-generated content.
iSOT: How was video used in the campaign?
Freedma: We created a back lot in Second Life and created stories we shot on film from the virtual world and distributed them out in the Internet.
iSPOT: Does the video content play beyond Second Life?
Freedman: It plays beyond it and takes the virtual world and makes it more readily available. There is an entire story we created that plays on a website we created, http://whatisscioncity.com. There’s a series of seven to ten video episodes around the Scion brand that have stopping points in the story that allow users to create content to fill in the gap, It creates a tight knit community who want to tell their story around the brand. Anyone has the ability to do it; they don’t have to be members of Second Life.
iSPOT: What’s Second Life’s role in it exactly?
Freedman: We built the experience there, we built an island in Second Life for Scion and a custom dealership. From a video perspective we filmed an entire story in Second Life, it’s a back lot.
iSPOT: What kind of characters were involved?
Freedman: We created the story based on Second Life avatars. We directed the actors, so it was just like filming a commercial in the virtual world.
iSPOT: How is the product displayed within the videos?
Freedman: It’s built within Second Life with a few changes to fit into the story from a look and feel perspective. It’s different, which makes it compelling. Characters drive it within the story. It’s not about pushing Scion features, it’s about creating a story around the brand.
iSPOT: How does a campaign like this benefit Scion in a manner that’s different from traditional advertising?
Freedman: It takes it to a different dimension throughout YouTube and other areas in the social Internet. Rather than create content that’s pushed out to people with banners or a TV spot, it’s content people are looking for and want to consume. Once they see it, they talk about it so it creates a strong community from word of mouth perspective that’s very powerful.
iSPOT: A large amount of virtual worlds are geared to children. How can advertisers use them?
Freedman: From an advertisers perspective it can be very powerful, from virtual worlds like Gaia Online and Hoppa Hotel. We launched a campaign for World Wrestling Entertainment to promote a pay-per-view event. Within this virtual world we created a story for kids that makes it incredibly engaging; part of it was showcasing a Royal Rumble commercial within the virtual world so they can see the video in real time. It was part of a five-day event that involved a competition for kids and the video was a part of it.
iSPOT: How is virtual world advertising being measured?
Freedman: We can measure how many downloads, how many visitors to a site and how many times it’s viewed, it’s similar kinds of metrics to online video advertising.
Copyright © 2008 DCA Business Media LLC. All rights reserved. All text, photos, graphics, artwork, and other material on the SHOOTonline.com site are copyrighted. All copying, reposting or reproduction, especially for commercial publicity use or resale in any manner, form, or medium, requires explicit, prior, permission from the publisher. If you have any questions regarding copyright or use of the materials on this site, are interested in article linking, reposting, pdf creation, or any form of rticle re-distribution contact permissions@shootonline.com, we will try to address your needs and concerns. SHOOTonline.com may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, terminate the accounts of users who infringe the intellectual property rights of others.
