Metaverse Marketing: Games and Virtual Worlds in Product Promotion

I honestly was surprised that the room was full and that so many people have been interested in this topic on the web2.0expo - I enjoyed the lively discussion after my presentation within the audience. thank you for coming and listening to my presentation.

Pardon me but... billboards in Second Life? Is this the best that "marketing in virtual worlds" has to suggest? Very 1.0 in my opinion, despite a presentation angle which seemed to hint that virtual worlds were somewhat "outside" or even "beyond" 2.0. They're part of the package, with some special and very interesting characteristics. Billboards? Please.

Have you joined my presentation?

No it's definitely not - what you should have noticed during my presentation. I think I explained 95% of the time why / what makes sense to do in virutal worlds apart from billboards - I talked max. 5% of the time about billboards (5 from 216 slides) as a way to get attention within a virtual worlds for your in-world activities.

So I can not understand why you reduce it to billboards in this comment? Maybe have a look on my presentation again. It's on slideshare now: http://www.slideshare.net/pixelsebi/metaverse-marketing-g...

More over I pointed out that Virtual Worlds have a lot of in common with what is Web2.0 about and that they can add a few more interesting values for specific usage-scenarios. So I can't understand your second remark aswell.

But thanks for your feedback!

I enjoyed this presentation and wished there had been more time to go deeper into subjects such as what will happen in the next generation of games PS3, Xbox, etc. as they come online.

The presentation style, and presenter were engaging and interesting. The presentation content was both insightful and provided a concrete steps today, and direction for the future on how business (and advertisers) can leverage the multitude of virtual worlds.

What surprised me most was the number of product-specific virtual worlds in operation today. Barbie world? Check. MTV world? Check. I can agree with the vision that the multitude of virtual worlds become like the multitude of web-sites. People are already not be just mono-world users.

The one insight I would like to ad [sic] is that in meta-verses; Your Avatar is your cookie.
It's a cookie people carry across multiple workstations and have spent 100s of hours to develop. No one will be deleting it in a hurry.

Thank you for this interesting talk. Havn't heard such a good summary about what companies can and should do in the metaverse before. I liked the way you explained to us, what people do there and what that means for companies, if they wanna engage in this worlds.

This was one of the best presentations I saw. I am starting to design an entrepreneurship course on Second Life for an educational institution, so it was really important for my work! :-)
It was great you upload all the 218 slides.
Thank you again for your presentation!

It was a pleasure to participate your session.

I think it is still a big problem to explain the potential of virtual worlds to people not involved into the structure of the complex variety of possibilities for users and companies. Worlds like Second Life are already naturally using almost all web 2.0 aspects on a high level. The problem is: probably too much; For the user this all looks totally different and it even FEELS different then any 2D/2.0 website. And so he consumes and uses this media different. So the old values we have in marketing and even economy are not working out in this experience and highly social based surroundings. It was a good choice to explain this general misunderstanding with an example like a "classic" realtime profile based advertising.

The thing is we need to get a hold on these new structures. A company must understand that this is a totally new and almost unexplored area where just a few people even can image how we actually can handle this bright power for our needs, without getting burned by the media itself.

For a long term Second Life resident and consultant it is great to see a full room when a presentation about Second Life is going on. Good overview and also good photos hopefully making clearer what Second Life is all about and where the chances are. The part about targeting and storing avatar data is of course always controversial and I am not a big fan of this. No wonder also that this part also raised the biggest amount of discussion.

And also good that there was quite some time for discussion which makes it more participatory, something I was somewhat missing from the rest of the conference (esp. after attending the Barcamp).