The Every Consort

Changing the Game: An Interview on Games and Business with David Edery and Ethan Mollick (Part Two)

The use of Second Life as a platform for consumer advertising and corporate promotion has generated a great deal of buzz in recent years. Now that the dust has started to settle, what do you see as the strengths and limitations of virtual worlds as a platform for brand messages?

the answer depends on the effective world. but, since you mention second life, we’ll focus on that. second life is, as innumerable news stories have sharp out, simply not a good quarters for traditional advertising. the world is too large and too sparsely populated for billboards, in general. and unmanned virtual exhibits and structures, no matter how distinguished, are sparely not engrossing to most consumers who look in on second life to experience the send of creating and the contentment of interacting with others. why would anyone opt to walk through an tenantless virtual hotel when they can descend upon remarkably ingenious and/or otherworldly territories, populated and/or created by individuals breed themselves? why walk recent a virtual billboard when you can teleport anywhere in an instant? infirm-cost, targeted advertising campaigns that are designed toengage consumers on a personal draw a bead, and volunteer them as brand agents, are far more effective.

All that said, the virtual hotel news article we referenced previously contains a hint as to the real potential of Second Life for businesses: not advertising, but harnessing user creativity to generate useful business innovations. Several large corporations have started working with the users of Second Life to model new products and test new services. Philips, for example, has been working with users to design new appliances in Second Life. Pontiac gave out virtual versions of its cars and encouraged Second Life users to hack and modify them.

Nadine velazquez

At the end of the day, Second Life is a world created by its users for its users. There’s something poetic — not to mention very sensible — about enabling those users to create and modify virtual goods that could someday be sold in the real world for millions, if not billions of dollars.

As you note, there is now a rush towards corporate sponsorship of Alternate Reality Games. What factors should a company consider before entering this space?

to date, most args acquire required a informative financial commitment and tremendous accomplishment to successfully execute, so businesses that are interested in creating an arg should be sure to get ready with an expert in the field. that said, an arg can prove an effective marketing tool, as demonstrated by audi’s taste of the heist. visitors who were attracted to audiusa.com by online advertisements promoting dexterity of the heist devoted 34% of their page views to “buying indicator” pages - i.e. car configurator, dealer locator, payment, estimator, and request a recite — which represented a 79% increase in qualification above previous launch efforts. and duplicity of the heist resulted in over 45 million pr impressions for audi, while generating ended 10,000 unique leads for audi dealerships.

Jordan Weisman, one of the inventors of the form, shared with us his well-informed views on the commitment necessary to pull off an ARG marketing project. In his words: “There’s a misconception that this form of marketing entertainment has to be cheaper. Well, it’s not cheaper. A heck of a lot more effort goes into an ARG than a 30-second TV spot. You have to create a lot more content, and there’s a much larger editorial process involved. But the benefits, as opposed to the 30-second spot, are the level of immersion you create, and the level of affection that a person has for the brand and the experience, not to mention the community that grows around the brand and the experience. Those things provide real lasting benefit to brands. And one of the great things about an ARG is that, unlike with a TV spot, you know how engaged people are. You know how many people visited your websites, you know how many people are participating on the message boards - you can quantify things.”

All that said, ARGs are poised to become much more than just marketing tools. In Changing the Game, we discuss how ARGs can be used for training purposes, and even for harnessing collective innovation. At this point, there are some exciting experiments in these areas that are worth examining, but more work is needed to develop ARGs to their full potential.

Corporate training games have been a huge growth area, even as other kinds of serious games have struggled to get traction. What should the developers of educational games learn from the space of corporate training and conversely, what do educational gam …