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From boom to ghost town
The potential of a whole new world through which to market one's products seemed almost too good to be true and yet that's exactly what Second Life delivered - at least to begin with. But once the novelty wore off, the data was crunched and the appeal was found to be wanting. For businesses at least, the gold rush had moved on leaving Second Life to fall into neglect and vice. Ed Waller reports.
Remember all those headlines about high street chains opening shops in computer-generated virtual world Second Life? Starwood's Hotels did it. American Apparel did it. So did Best Buy, Reebok and Adidas. Dell Computers even bought a virtual island in the online universe... How cool was that?
Well, not very cool, it turned out. Fast forward two short years and all those shops and islands are now deserted, closed or even vandalised by online oiks. Back in 2006, brands piled on to Second Life like lemmings. There were a couple of really good, thought-out campaigns such as Starwood's, in which a prototype W Hotel was built based on user suggestions. But the pile-up of brands in its wake was ridiculous. They built it. No one came. With its cutting-edge kudos and hi-tech appeal, Second Life was a marketer's dream - so what went wrong?
The early movers into Second Life probably weren't thinking in terms of persuading its residents to come and shop in their cyberstores, or if they were it was a poor second place to generating headlines in the real world, where there are far more people than in Second Life. So the law of diminishing returns started applying to the newsworthiness of setting up (virtual) shop there. The online kudos moved on to someplace else, and the headline-grabbing potential of Second Life shops fell dramatically. Like when shops first built transactional websites, after the twentieth news story, it wasn't news anymore and editors sought better stories.
Furthermore, after the razzamatazz of CGI stores died down, marketers began to realise that a) there's an enormous discrepancy between Second Life's 'registered' users (which in April stood at 13 million) and actual regular visitors and participants, and b) that they didn't know anything about their anonymous visitors other than their simple Second Life names, and c) that maximising exposure of your new CGI shop and products is hindered by the fact that it's simply not that easy to participate in Second Life. It requires a pretty high degree of dedication and technical know-how, applications must be downloaded and avatars must be built and clothed...
Or not. The behaviour of Second Lifers is becoming much less about browsing nicely designed shops online and far more x-rated lately. In fact, the things that are bought and sold the most in the online universe are, believe it or not, CGI genital organs, which are made by online code-writers and bought and sold like the CGI shoes that Adidas created. Once endowed with the genitalia of your choice, much cyber-shagging ensues. Not exactly the kind of environment that high street retailers want to associate with their brands.
So, the consensus in medialand is that Second Life is pretty much over as a big vehicle for brands and marketing for now. It gave brands hardly any control over what happened to their expensively created CGI shops, and no real data about the people who visited their stores. As they say online, WTF?
Far more interesting to the major brands is a new development from Google, which is combining its experience as the world's biggest ad server with its own R&D in the virtual world area. The result is Google Lively, a new application in which people can create their own virtual selves and rooms and embed them on their own websites, much like you can with Google Earth, thus giving brands far more control than Second Life. Having Google behind Lively will also give advertisers and retailers more confidence than in Second Life. However, now that Mark Kingdon, who headed leading US digital ad agency Organic, is at the helm, we may yet see a second life in Second Life.
