Second Life Recap

Some very interesting comments on Friday's Second Life post. My thanks to everyone who participated.

But to put things in perspective, here are some key things I think we now know about Second Life:

It's first and foremost a game and any sort of high-involvement game is going to get some extreme types. And while I was being somewhat facetious, the fact that someone logs on to Second Life to have their avatar work as a security guard in a mall created by another avatar says just about everything re: the level of involvement of SL players.

The technology has great potential for things like business conferences and trade shows that can take place outside the confines of a game. Crayon, Jaffe & Verdino's not-an-agency has had some success showing off this potential.

BUT it also seems clear that bringing mainstream advertisers on there is risky.

First off, no one's asked the more umm "dedicated" players how they feel about having Reebok and Coke in their world. I mean given that people are starting and building their own businesses (both physically and metaphorically) - do they want competition from real world businesses? I ask this because even for brands whose demographics overlap those of the typical Second Life player, being there could prove far more harmful than helpful if Second Life players feel that (you knew it was coming) Your Brand Is Not My Friend™.

Now Jonathan Trenn had an interesting idea, which was for the companies to work with the Second Life businesspeople to provide them with items they may want, e.g. sign someone on there up as a Second Life Reebok store owner or give them virtual Black and Decker tools to build their virtual stores. But no one seems to be doing this. Yet.

Experimenting with a technology like Second Life is a great idea. We just need to be more thoughtful as to what shapes those experiments take, lest we be branded (once again) as nothing more than a bunch of charlatans.

Second Life Takes Another Major Hit

Poor Jaffe.

If Second Life hasn’t taken enough of a beating in the press lately, today’s Wall Street Journal weighs in with a particularly devastating article about a typical Second Life player.

Entitled “Is This Man Cheating On His Wife?” the article*, by Alexandra Alter examines the truly sad life of one Ric Hoogenstraat, a 53 year-old Arizona resident who is employed as a $14 an hour call-center operator.

The article focuses on the havoc his Second Life obsession is having on his relationship with his real-world wife Sue. Because whereas in real life Mr. Hoogenstraat is an aging hippie who suffers from diabetes and chronic joblessness, in Second Life he is a muscular young entrepreneur with a fortune of some 1.5 million Linden (SL’s virtual currency) and a hot young Second Life wife. (Mr. Hoogenstraat’s SL avatar married a female avatar in a ceremony that was attended by several dozen other avatars. Really.)

One telling statistic of the article is that even LindenLabs, SL’s owner, admits that the number of “active users" is closer to 450,000. (Another is that Mr. Hoogenstraat is able to “employ” a virtual security guard for one of his virtual malls. Which means that someone is logging on to SL to pretend to be a mall security guard.)

But after reading the article, and the pathetic picture it paints of Second Life players, all I could think is how I’d hate to be on the other end of the phone when the CMOs of Coke, Reebok and countless other companies that have been duped into spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Second Life, get a hold of it.

That said, I don’t mean to dismiss Second Life totally. The technology itself holds much potential. Businesses are already using SL to interview candidates and hold virtual job fairs, but one real payday will come when someone adopts the technology for business meetings.

To wit: I have a lawyer friend who is often on all day conference calls. Video conferencing isn’t a great option because everyone can see you squirming and yawning. But if he was able to attend these meetings as a voice-enabled avatar, and if every time he spoke there was a little label under him that said “Joe Smith, Dewey Bilkum & Howe” it would be a drastic quality-of-life improvement for him. For those of us in the ad biz, we’d be able to virtually present concepts to clients, who would see them in real time on their screen rather than cheating and peeking at them ahead on time from the PDFs we’ve posted on the extranet.

*The Wall Street Journal is a pay site, but I was able to access the entire article on their site. Not sure why, but hopefully it will work for everyone else.

File This Under "What Were They Thinking?"

Front page of today's NY Times Business section has this article about how Johnson & Johnson is suing the American Red Cross for copyright infringement over the use of the aforementioned red cross.

Seems the ARC is selling first aid kits and other tchotchkes with their name and logo on them and J&J is all bent out of shape.

And I'm reading this thinking WTF? Why don't you go and run TV spots* showing your CEO kicking puppies and kittens to death? It would have a less deleterious effect.

I mean absolutely no good can come out of this for J&J. Even if they're in the right about the red cross logo, you're not going to convince America about that. People like the Red Cross. And suing a popular charitable organization over something so blatantly trivial?

Mind-boggling.

To make matters worse, the Times reports that the head of the American Red Cross is "clearly outraged" about the lawsuit. Which means lots and lots of bad publiciity raining down on J&J.

Ouch.

UPDATE: Check out the comments on AdFreak in defense of J&J and up in arms about the assault on J&J's cherished brand. Am I the only one who doesn't think these comments are random?

*And yes I know, for less money they could then post longer versions on YouTube and maybe even set up a website ;)

The Toad Stool's New Look

In an effort to save the eyesight of my loyal readers I've selected a new template from the blogger.com template collection.

Because it seems David Ogilvy was right-- black type is easier to read than white type.

Let me know if you like it, hate it or are merely indifferent.

Thanks,

Toad

Your Taste or Your Customers? Children’s Edition

Ratatouille vs. Underdog

In my ongoing campaign to get advertisers (and agency creatives) to realize that there is more than one standard to judge work (e.g. not every product is marketed to upscale early 30something hipster males) I’d ask you to turn your attention to two children’s movies that Disney put out this summer: Ratatouille and Underdog.

The former was universally praised—nay, slavered over, by critics, while the latter was universally panned.

But from the POV of the children who sat through them, Ratatouille was an abject failure and Underdog a charming-if-not-totally-memorable tale.

Now why is this? Well I’m guessing it’s because Ratatouille is a wonderful movie for an adult film critic—and for the imaginary ideal child the adult film critic wishes he had—while Underdog is merely well done KidFlick 101 and thus reprehensible to serious artistes.

Let’s start with the basic premise: Ratatouille is about being true to one’s art. Now call me crazy, but this is a concept that is pretty much lost on anyone under the age of 14. It’s also set in the world of French haute cuisine. (Ditto.)

The most telling scene in the movie is one where the forces of good take back a 5-star gourmet restaurant from the forces of evil, who have put out a line of frozen burritos and frozen pizzas under the name of the famous chef who started the restauant (e.g. a little Wolfgang Puck joke for the more urbane adults in the audience.) And to celebrate, the forces of good make a bonfire of the frozen entrees. Now in the theater I was in, the kids were completely baffled as to why anyone would consider the destruction of frozen pizza to be a good and noble thing. I mean frozen pizza is one of the foods your average 10 year old lives on. Destroying it just seems… wrong.

I have yet to meet a kid who really liked Ratatouille. Older kids didn’t exactly hate it, but it was clear to them there was a lot in there they just didn’t get.

Underdog, on the other hand, every kid gets. First off, it’s about a boy with a dead mother. (And you know how psychologists and English professors love to come up with theories on why kids love stories about kids with dead parents. But they do. It’s a formula Disney warmly embraces, as just about every popular Disney movie to Bambi to Cinderella to Lion King features a kid with a dead parent. But I digress.) The plot in Underdog isn’t all that surprising… to an adult. To a kid who hasn’t seen several thousand movies, the fact that the boy at first rejects the dog and then comes to love him is actually a surprising and heartwarming plot twist. And it’s a dog. Kids love pet movies if the pet is at all loveable. And Underdog is pretty loveable. Critics have complained that the plot is hard to follow, that it’s not clear what Simon Bar-Sinister (Peter Dinklage) is actually plotting. But that’s not important to kids. It’s clear he was up to no good, Underdog and the boy stopped him and that’s all that matters.

One review I read actually complained that having Jason Lee do Underdog’s voice made him think of My Name Is Earl the entire time. Can we all agree that none of the 7 year olds in the audience were bothered by this? (For those of you unfamiliar with 7 year olds, it’s because none of them have ever seen My Name is Earl.)

Now critics aren’t ad agencies, but I think the analogy here is a pretty solid one. Giving your tastes greater importance than those of your audience is a recipe for disaster.

Even if your audience is only four feet tall.

A Rose By Any Other Name (More On Storytelling)

So Bill Green, better known as the erudite host of Make The Logo Bigger, has provided some insight into this insidious thing called "storytelling."

It's just good old fashioned sales promotion, all gussied up in interweb garb and sporting a brand new name.

To wit:

The idea of storytelling as he explained it to me was simliar to a script, as that's how he approached it. People here are missing the intent behind this mindset. Don't think of story in the traditional way. The 'story' is the sequence of how the whole campaign would unfold initially, yes. This could include print, TV, radio, non-traditional, etc,.

But the key here is that the consumer could enter that story at any point in a non-linear way, not at the beginning or the end. (Think Pulp Fiction with its out-of-sequence non-linerar approach to scene juxtaposition.) So the consumer might see a website, which in turn may lead them back to a tv spot to be released later. Or a viral campaign drives them to search Google for more clues, and so on.

Like many of you, I've done campaigns like this without calling them "storytelling." We called them "promotions" or "events" and swore to the client that whether someone saw the ad in the newspaper or the TV commercial or heard the radio spot, they'd be able to enter the promotion and get the whole story. Later we added website and YouTube video to the mix, which allowed for more clues and fun, but we never called it "storytelling." I mean the whole point of promotions is that the consumer can come in at any point and still catch on/catch up.

Now this is not to take away from these sort of efforts. Many of them are quite good, and very effective. After all, sales promotions were the original "interactive" vehicle.

It's just that "storytelling" word that's so irksome.

Really Mad Men

In order to sell their clients' product, a breakfast cereal aimed at kids, a team at an ad agency came up with the idea of creating their own animated series. The videos, which are available in four 5-minute segments, are about a new superhero, and while kids may take it at face value, it offers a great big wink to those adults watching along, with sly jokes and parodies built in.

Three other animated shorts are included with the superhero videos, with preroll and postroll spots after each one touting the clients product.

The videos are very successful and prove to be viral, as kids tell other kids about them and more and more people watch.

As a result, the account guy, who was one of the writers of the series, leaves the agency to start his own animation production company, which outsources the actual drawing to Mexico, thus realizing considerable cost savings.

Another interweb success story?

No.

A success story from the Mad Men era: 1960, to be exact. The superhero was Underdog, the agency was Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample (now Saatchi), the account guy was W. Watts Biggers and you can read about it here.

Disney's Newest Character

AdAge, G. Parker's new favorite ad magazine, reports that Disney just spent $350 million to buy Club Penguin, an ad-free sort-of-social-networking site aimed at kids 6 to 14.

Those of you without kids in this age range have no idea how big Club Penguin is with kids in this age group.

But I'm wondering if Disney bet on the wrong pony here. Club Penguin's biggest competitor is Webkinz™, and if the Tadpoles and their friends are any indication, it's Webkinz by a mile.

Webkinz is one of those ideas you kick yourself for not thinking up. It works like this: you go to the store and buy a Webkinz stuffed animal for around $10-15. And not just any store. Webkinz are only sold in Hallmark stores and other non-traditional locations, thus ensuring scarcity.

Now once you have your Webkinz, you go online and enter the secret code that's in an envelope stitched onto the animal. You name the animal and set up a room for him/her in your Webkinz house. You need to feed and play with your animal to keep it happy by buying food, toys and furniture from the Webkinz store. You buy this all with KinzCash- virtual currency you earn by playing games in the Webkinz arcade. (The Tadpoles all seem to know which games earn the most money for the least effort)

There's no end to how tricked out you can make your Webkinz house and what accessories you can buy. You can also talk to your friends (or make new ones) online, but only via a series of about 2 dozen canned comments-- no independent chat allowed. You can also send a gift to your friends in the hope they'll send one back to you.

I actually find it educational in that it teaches them money management and responsibility-- each Tadpole currently has about a dozen Webkinz and they're quite good about logging in and taking care of their virtual pets. (You also have to remember to log out: it seems a friend of theirs logged out leaving her Webkinz on a treadmill and came back to find it quite ill and in need of a visit to the Webkinz Clinic. For real.)

But when I tell you guys it's huge, it's an understatement: every one of their friends seems to have at least a dozen Webkinz and everyone I work with who has kids that age seems to be in the midst of this mania as well.

Now I'm not sure if Webkinz has actually surpassed Club Penguin (a fully online experience that does not require any offline purchases), if my town is part of the "Webkinz Belt," if there's any sort of socioeconomic factor involved in which one you go to, or if Webkinz (which is newer) is Club Penguin 2.0.

I do know, however, that this is another evolution of social media, one that's evolved specifically for tweens. And that if I were the guy who came up with it, I'd be one rich Toad.