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September 27, 2006

OMMA Panelists: Advergames Outscore In-Game Placement

Media Post: “Games built around a brand, or advergames, are often a better option for marketers than placing ads within a game, a panel of executives said Tuesday at the OMMA conference in New York.

Advergames usually are relatively cheap to produce, and simple to distribute, the executives said. What’s more, advergames don’t require the same degree of coordination between different parties as ads served while consumers are playing a game.”

Of course, all panelists were from the advergaming companies. Blah.

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Multiple Moebius Personalities

This morning I happened across an interesting though not unexpected bit of advertising (Link): a poster showing a Second Life avatar decked out in virtual clothing (the boots being the advertised item) but formatted as a comic book page.

virbootcomicadW2

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September 23, 2006

Wall Street Journal on Second Life Fashion

“Now, Virtual Fashion“, Wall Street Journal, By Andrew Lavallee, September 22, 2006; Page B1.

The article can be accessed online for free for a week, but then will go behind the iron curtain. The highlights, verbatim:

“It’s actually, conceptually, not unlike making real clothing,” says Alyssa LaRoche, 26 years old, who began designing clothes for Second Life in 2004 under her avatar’s name, Aimee Weber.” (first time Aimee’s RL name is revealed?)

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September 20, 2006

Data: Gamers Are Heavy Media Consumers

Universal McCann has released that part of its Media in Mind study that deals with gamers (all reports here, a direct link to the 2-page pdf here). A few interesting tidbits. “Video gamers are above average media consumers, partuclarly for the internet and DVD’s.” Video game players top overall adult media consumption by some 20 minutes a week. The study also found that gaming is a more social activity than previously thought.

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September 17, 2006

The Coming of Automated C- Stores

getngoW

When I read about this new employee-free convenience store (Link) yesterday via the Velcro City Tourist Board site, the first thing that came to my mind was how the Real and Virtual Worlds are really starting to mash up. All we need is for one of these Get & Go kiosk stores to accept virtual currency for people who are unaware of what’s happening in virtual worlds like EVE Online and Second Life to come face-to-face with the future. It won’t be people exchanging “game” currency for real world currency in the backend of some computer network, and it won’t be people using virtual bucks to order real things online. This is on the corner of Main and Exchange in Averageville. Watch the news coverage that’s sure to come.

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Marketing to Fragments While Everything Else Converges
There’s a blog entry posted by HP’s Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence, Eric Kintz, (Link) that might be of interest to some of you. He discusses the issue of how marketers and advertisers should deal with the multiple identities people create for their various online activities (I wish he’d stuck to the customer/consumer issue, but that’s not really what he’s addressing here). His response to it is what he calls “dissociative identity marketing”.

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September 15, 2006

One Small Step for Adidas

sl_adidasW

Via 3pointD comes news that the virtual Adidas store is up and selling inside Second Life (Link). I just popped in to take a peek, and as I’ve come to expect from Rivers Run Red, the store is… white. But there is some grey too. In a few places.

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September 14, 2006

Fashion Show Scheduled in MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach

MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach - “the whole Laguna experience in a parallel online universe” - is hosting an “exclusive” fashion show tonight (Sept.14).

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Peugeot Competition Going Transreal

transrealMoovie

Earlier in the week I was reading a forum post about the next Peugeot automotive design competition (an annual affair). Surfing to the competition website (Link) I was surprised to learn that it’s going transreal. Here’s the pitch:

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September 12, 2006

Personal Space in Virtual Space
This one seems rather intuitive for anyone who has spent time in Second Life, but an article over on nature.com (Link) reports on findings which suggests that people using avatars appear to behave in much the same way in the virtual world as they would in the real world. From that article:

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September 9, 2006

C|Net Talks Multiverse
About a week ago I was wondering about Multiverse, the one-size-fits-all platform on which developers can create their own virtual worlds. How were the first projects moving along? Would the beta open up this year as promised? What tools were necessary to develop content?

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September 7, 2006

Spore To Offer Printable Game Characters

Looks like Maxis and EA will let players to order their custom Spore characters as physical figurines for an extra price.
– 4colorrebellion

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Furniture 3D Models in Games and Google Earth

I wrote before about Google Earth and SL-like games becoming increasingly alike. Here’s a nice illustration.

An Ikea bed model for Sims 2.

An Ikea bed model for Sketch-up and Google Earth (gEarth?).

Here’s an Ikea table for Second Life itself.

Also, a video of a project “named 3D IKEA Manual [that] aims to show the potential of augmented reality (AR) in domestic use”.

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September 4, 2006

One Big Second Life Synopsis
Henry Jenkins, the well-known Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, has posted a nice (and rather long) synopsis of the marketing side of Second Life called “Experimenting with Brands in Second Life” (Link) which I’ve just read. Of course I once again find myself pointing out in comments that the issues extend beyond intangible media into the realm of tangible product. Not quite yet, but soon there will be compelling examples. How that might come to pass is, of course, often on my mind and behind much of what I write here.

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September 3, 2006

“Advertising in Games” Thesis Posted Online

So, the thesis has been defended and I upped it yesterday to its own brand new site at Games Brands Play. It’s in PDF, but I am working on making it more readable and will add pictures, too.
Although this blog was started as a bookmark dump and a “companion” to the work, I’m not stopping it now that the thesis is over. I will probably move it to that new URL at some point, but if you are on RSS you should be fine.

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