When sister site Gamasutra recently spoke to Justin Townsend, CEO of in-game advertising network IGA worldwide, we also asked him if he sees further opportunities in the casual online game and social virtual world space. "It's something we've been exploring for quite some time now," he said. "It’s not for our lack of trying, but the issue we have is in something like Second Life, most Second Life consumers are actually in there for sort of sexual things, or personal things like that."
Townsend also feels there's not enough reach for Second Life or any other online world at present. "One single AAA game, even if it sells more than 5 million units, doesn’t have enough reach or a big enough addressable audience in its own right. When we bring games into our network, we aggregate them. A sports advertiser like Nike comes to us and says, 'This is my budget, and I want to reach 18-34 year old males in all of your soccer or sports titles.'"
Thus, he says, "The problem you have with virtual worlds is you don’t have a high enough addressable audience, a big enough audience within one game in its own right. So you'd have to aggregate them, which brings up the second problem: Virtual worlds are all designed differently, and therefore there are no standards around ad formats. If you look back to what we do – EA, or Activision or whomever have all adopted our standards for different ad formats."
He adds, "When it comes to virtual worlds, these are mainly creatively-driven environments and frankly not open to advertising. And if they are, it's hard to get one set of advertising standards defined through all the different virtual world companies. If you wanted to provide ads into virtual worlds, it would be one-off bespoke, as opposed to aggregating ten virtual worlds together and providing a decent amount of reach to consumers."
Comments (2)
Although virtual worlds are a promising way for marketers to reach technology-savvy early adopters, they are currently much more well suited to the needs of educators (for instruction and training) and private organizations (for distributed work-flow).
Townsend is right to point out that virtual worlds do not yet have the sort of reach of more traditional advertising platforms. One of reasons that virtual worlds have not yet gained widespread acceptance among mainstream consumers is the fact that exploring virtual worlds is intrinsically anti-social as far as people in one's immediate environment are concerned.
Until platform and interface developers figure out a way of overcoming the intrinsically "antisocial" nature of most virtual worlds (see for example the article posted at http://flowtv.org/?p=1116), they will continue to be more appropriate for education and distributed work-flow applications.
Posted by Aaron Delwiche | February 4, 2008 2:15 PM
Posted on February 4, 2008 14:15
advise for advertisers and real world product/service providers.:)
advertising as you do it dont work in the vr worlds because all vr worlds that are successful are vertical and only reach a themed audience. the mistake all the new metapundits are making is to compare vr worlds to TV /print media of 60 years ago as a whole- looking for wide shot ads- superbowl thinking for ad fame..
vr worlds are at best now and most likely to be, veticle "themed" communties that can only reach the audience the content appeals to... like a single tv show or movie.
sponsorships and product placements as well as event marketing are the only real ROI in VR worlds other than subcriptions and esales....
but you dont want to hear that at the conference..:)
since it takes the wind out of all the vr world sytems platform building companies, vced to make the second life "killer" app targeted at myspace billions of trapped users..lol
the answer is in the producers creating original content for the medium.. but they are not invited to the conference or the meta U at stanford as far as i can see from the rosters...only those arguing over whose platform is better for pepsi or frame rate.
shame you dont here from them, in the end theyll make the vr worlds that make the money, not the bloggers or the copycat 3dmyspace clone ventures.... blizzard is not an ad agency, nor is it a platform company like SUN... and yet they with WOW show the path, even for non game content, even the dryest learning app, will only appeal to its target audience.
cheap cost of entry for server space and attachemnt to paypal is a year away.--- p2p web3d as well....
forget the tech companies all trying to be bought by google....
talk to those with vertical content communities in SL now.. before they dont need to talk to you later.... advise for advertisers....
they are the only ones who'll be in the game in 5 years anyway.:)
c3
Posted by cube | February 5, 2008 4:56 PM
Posted on February 5, 2008 16:56