Virtual marketing failures: Apathy or hubris?
by Tateru Nino 
Oct 27th 2008 at 12:00PM
Filed under: Business models, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Marketing in virtual worlds, particularly the collaborative virtual environments like Second Life, have been widely considered to have been failures among marketers -- particularly among those marketers who actually attempted it.
Meanwhile, on the education side of things, Ignatius Onomatopoeia has done exactly those things that seem to have escaped almost every Second Life marketing strategy we've seen. Faced with a lack of direction and engagement in his students in the virtual environment, he tested, trialled, adapted and used what actually worked.
Right now, you're probably thinking "Well, thanks a lot, Captain Obvious," and you'd be right. Because it is really, really obvious. It is also something that not many of these marketers actually tried. In fact, they all had a few things in common in their virtual marketing efforts.
Virtually every campaign and marketing department to deploy in Second Life did all four of these things. Most managed at least three:
1. They failed to understand their market. In many cases, they didn't even check to see if their target demographic was actually even present.
2. They showed no understanding of the platform. Campaigns often involved weaknesses of the platform, rather than strengths.
3. Little or no idea about what result was to be achieved, and how to measure it.
4. Instead of any attempt to adapt the campaign or run a modified follow-up campaign to improve results, the projects were abandoned.
Each one of these things alone can cause a marketing strategy to fail in the atomic world, so why commit all four at once in the virtual environment?
We can only pin it down to either apathy, or hubris.
Either the marketers were so confident in their success that they failed to follow the basics that they learned in college, or they simply didn't bother. There are successes. Coca-Cola comes immediately to mind. They're working on a followup campaign, after the success of their first effort.
While educators like Ignatius Onomatopoeia are doing all of these things to develop and expand learning outcomes for students, marketers behave as if they're throwing bags of marketing money at a brick wall, then slinking disconsolately away when not enough of it sticks, and then blaming the wall for being insufficiently sticky. It's unsubtle, unskilled, and ultimately it is unsuccessful.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marianne McCann said on 12:48PM 10-27-2008
Having some real-life background in marketing and stuff, I've long noted those four points. It's like early efforts on the web (a good example? use archive.org's "Wayback Machine" and see what McDonald's used as their first website) where marketeers came in. did not bother to understand the medium or the audience.
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Tateru Nino said on 12:56PM 10-27-2008
Would you classify that as apathy or as hubris?
Marianne McCann said on 2:22PM 10-27-2008
Hubris, definitely hubris. This seems to be especially the case given that, after so many of these failed, the blame was put on Second Life instead of the marketing folks (and by extension the companies they represent), in much the same way the web was blamed back in the mid to late 1990s.
Doubledown Tandino said on 1:25PM 10-27-2008
Aren't the content creation companies the one to blame here? Large RL companies took the bite about "bought" a marketing campaign from a SL development company.
Could it be that the larger more successful content creation companies basically signed the deals with promises of packed sims, increases of exposure and sales, etcetcetcetc...., and only delivered the land and the build an the content?
Large companies and corporations came in to SL and spent thousands of RL dollars.... and primarily only used a small handful of content creation companies.
I think the most successful RL company campaigns in SL aren't the ones that took the approach of hiring a creation company to build a sim and send out a press release blast.
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Tateru Nino said on 1:28PM 10-27-2008
Sometimes they are, however I'm sure a lot of developers can tell tales of businesses that engaged them to make something that the developers knew just plain wouldn't work.
Sometimes the business just considers the content-creation businesses as muscle, fit only for the heavy lifting. I've encountered a number of those situations over the last few years in SL.
steve said on 1:31PM 10-27-2008
after googling both names i would have to lean towards apathy because if they where hubris then should there not be more passion?
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Pavig Lok said on 3:06PM 10-27-2008
It's neither apathy nor hubris. Marketing companies can engage in iterative marketing when they have their feet planted in a market. Virtual worlds had no existing foundation.
Unfortunately the one thing they can't market is inexperience, so for the first wave of marketers would be reluctant to sell this plan to their clients: "ok let's do some stuff that might work, that's phase 1... then later we'll do it all again when we know what was successful and what failed." Instead they sold: "we know what we're doing" and took investor cash to figure out what actually worked.
They may have _tried_ to build iterative marketing into the mix, but any sensible client would figure, if it hadn't been done before, then it was a high risk proposition... better to wait till these metaverse development companies had burned their competitors cash on their learning process and come back later with a higher chance of a successful campaign.
Well that's my two cents.. does it make sense? I think that's what happened... oh that, apathy and hubris :P
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Prokofy said on 2:24AM 10-28-2008
Once again, the tekkie wikis heap scorn on corporations for "not understanding the platform" -- when they a) probably never heard what a platform *is* and b) have no way of understanding what the platform is because that's a tekkie wiki thingie.
Honestly, when Nick Wilson says the tekkies should get out of the way, after seeing VW08 in London, he's not wrong. Of course, he should get out of the way, too.
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Sarg Bjornson said on 11:45AM 10-28-2008
I expect big companies and marketeers to know their tekkie wiki thingies. If they don't, they aren't doing their job!
Digado said on 7:51AM 10-28-2008
I think you mistakenly qualify the intention of 'SL marketing' as being targetted at the inside community. The undifinable (and small) mass of the actual platform is really irrellivant to most marketing endeavours - but the way SL was a 'hot topic' created an opportunity for fast advertising ROI.
What it comes down to is, Reebok has a multi-million dollar advertising budget. Spending 10k in SL got them more attention than spending the same amount on running an ad on this website or similar online media. Mission accomplished.
When remarkability ran out (and the chances of getting named into mainstream articles, or linking) this ROI model was dropped, and companies 'retreated'. They understood the platform just 'perfect' as a way to get mentioned and get into the conversation of the moment (Virtual Worlds).
Perhaps there was an opportunity for more. Perhaps some 'influencers' could be found in SL and create ROI in less traditional ways by 'understanding the platform' but all-in-all the odds of this weren't very attractive to but the most optimistic agencies. Largely due to the lack of mass and a non-transparent market (and later on the negative backlash on the platform itself).
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Anthony Cappetto said on 1:29PM 10-28-2008
A way that could be considered is a concept that could make a tangible connection between real and virtual worlds, even if that is a 'simple' one such as using developments in augmented or mixed reality. This could help bridge real world viewers to want to visit the SL or virtual platform site, increasing the potential effectiveness of the VW campaign.
This direction might fall into the 'remarkable' category, but such a way to merge might bring the target audience in from both sides- real and virtual.
Iggy O said on 11:14AM 10-28-2008
Tateru, thank you for the plug about my teaching. The students, looking at SL with fresh eyes, see some interesting phenomena. My current class "gets SL" as a non-game for fun, business, and education.
I disagree with Digado to a degree. As to where we agree, I think it's correct that firms saw a small active-user base and made a small investment when SL seemed "hot." I'd also ask how many of these RL firms, like Nike, seem to have a lame in-world presence just to fly the brand's flag? Maybe that will help later, if SL grows huge. Then they can begin bringing in virtual lawyers to issue cease-and-desist orders.
But companies' failure to market goes deeper. One student took a good look at marketing by Dominus Motor Company and claimed, quite persuasively, that DMC "gets it" while Scion (despite a cool build) really doesn't. For instance--a virtual car dealership does not need a roof, especially if you want your product and customers to literally "fly off the lot."
Perhaps it's because Francis Chung need not answer to a committee before deciding what her dealerships should look like. I can only imagine how many folks had to okay Motorati for Pontiac. Only a few dozen, I'd guess--tiny by GM standards but still a block on bold new ideas.
I have not driven a virtual Scion (I love their cars IRL). But do they fly? The in-world Pontiacs did not. Would not have hurt GM's ROI to add a different script. They did invest more than 10K in Motorati...50 Cent does not perform for 50 cents :D
I just think GM applied RL driving paradigms to a place that does have cool tracks for racing but also steam-powered airships and teleportation. Corporations are correct to see SL's user base as small, but they are not seeing the paradigm for the peeps here...VWs, like flat-Web browsers, are transformative technologies.
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