Brand embassadors in virtual worlds

Yesterday Finnish online entertainment company Sulake arranged an event focusing on "harnessing youth to act as brand ambassadors". The evening was kicked off by Mr. Jonathan Epstein from in-game advertising firm Double Fusion. Mr. Epstein highlighted five issues that are important when targeting to youth in this entertainment rich, networked society:
1. Include, don’t intrude
2. Keep it personal
3. We are what we shop
4. Fuel the aspiration
5. Focus on ROO (return on objective)

A couple of successful cases were also presented where Sulake products IRC-Galleria and Habbo Hotel were used to reach the right target groups. My absolute favorite was Stabilo case (Lindell). Heli Vainio, brand manager from Lindell gave really inspiring and heartened talk about their experiences at the IRC-Galleria. They looked for new ways to market Stabilo highlighting pens for youngsters. They had their message, the product, manga-drawing competition and some ideas about utilizing the web. They brainstormed with IRC-Galleria guys and came up with an idea of focusing on their Manga drawing competition (banner) and offering "ihq-sälä" (virtual swag) to youth.

They got huge number of drawings to the competition and 30 000 individuals joined the Stabilo community to get virtual Stabilo-branded swag. Lindell increased Stabilo sales to a big bookstore chain by 50%.

MarketingExperiments blog has related post about virtual swag.

Microsoft has also learned to be brave and utilize virtual worlds when launching their new applications. Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 will be launched at the Second Life on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 9:00 A.M. PDT. Microsoft promises to show the applications in action but they also understand the possibility to bring together product experts and techsavvy peers and to enable open discussion.

Rupture --adding community-aspect to gaming

Besides Playstation party games (EyeToy, Buzz), Massive Multiplayer Online Games provide the most social experiences in (digital) gaming at the moment. Many MMOGs are about joining a guild and climbing up the ranks of players. Even though it is about playing together, many players consider it 'hard to communicate with other players, organize game playing together and learn about other gamers' identities, online and offline' (from BusinessWeek).

'Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. It will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing.' The Rupture beta-testing period is about to start -- so all you Wowers, put your guild together to enroll for beta-testing.

I am still not totally aware of all the features of Rupture but it reminds me of Dark Portal by Dynamoid. 'Dark Portal is a picture community, made for WoW-players, by WoW-players, to post their screenshots and real life pictures and interact through comments'. It is a sister portal for IRC-galleria which is the most used world wide web service in the Nordic according to TNS Metrix. Dynamoid or TNS Metrix also claim that it is the most active social media community in the world -- which is really-really hard to believe because there exist such services as MySpace, Habbo and Second Life. Anyhow -- it is good to be self-confident ;) And EVERYONE of the 400 000 registered users of the service spend approx. 18 HOURS per month at the IRC-galleria. That is quite a lot time for uploading /browsing photos and adding virtual 'stickers' and comments. Could these type of horizontal linkages be a new start for cross media services? Surely SMS-TV games and tv-formats like Big Brother exist but that cannot be the whole truth of cross media.