Someone recently asked me to check with the Lab and ask about the “Big Marketing Push” that the Lab said at SLCC that it was gearing up for. If I recall rightly, the question was along the lines of “Has it happened yet? Or is it still to come?”
I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten who it was who asked me – but I did ask the Lab and get an answer.
“No, you didn’t miss it. Our display ads and other marketing efforts are continuing to bring new users to Second Life, and as conversion rates improve and we launch new products, you’ll see more marketing from the Lab.”
I think that basically means that the banner ads with the vampires and the vampire-themed marketing were basically what we were talking about.
On the plus side, not too long after I got that answer, the Lab has completely reworked (or should I say ‘revamped’?) the Web-site… err, with a vampire taking the front spot.
I still don’t actually know that I like the marketing message, so maybe it isn’t the plus that I might have suggested.
“Experience and create anything you can imagine.” is not actually true. I can imagine a whole lot more than Second Life can deliver.
“Play games with friends” is cool.
“role-play with vampires” … not so much.
“shop for unique fashions and attend live music performances!“ is fine.
But the actual videos/trailers for marketing Second Life are…. I’ll charitably call them misrepresentation. It’s not that avatars cannot do the things depicted so slickly in the videos, so much as that it can require hours of stage-management to get them to do some of the things that are so casually displayed.
That sort of thing bugs me, and I’m not even quite sure why.
I was thinking the same thing about those ads… two people in hoverpods, coming together, high-fiving… how many gestures and scirpts and takes did that take?
Ah, Marketing. Always writing checks that your developers and operations staff can’t cash.
-ls/cm
Glad you got an answer. I raised the same question myself after seeing “Your World, Your Imagination” make a return (via Hamlet).
Technically, I have no issue with “anything you can imagine” in the advertising – sure, I can imagine a whole lot more than SL can deliver, but I see where they’re coming from. However, like you, the vampires thing leaves me cold & I also looked at the comment about playing games with friends as potentially being taken to mean that SL is “just another Facebook / Farmville” environment by the uninitiated.
The latest video is a little better in this regard – although elements are still obviously staged – but the overall message, to me, is so mixed as to be confusing.
If this *is* the “big campaign” Rodvik was talking about at SLCC, which was due to see “significant investment” (his words). Then I can only assume someone, somewhere, is making a pile of money out of LL for little or no effort or in offering much in return.
I agree about the Machinima ads. They should be showing how it is experienced. Unfortunately some of us have become skilled at showing SL in a way thats more cinematic than it actually is, I’m guilty of that. I’d love to see a promo video that shows SL as SL with all it’s some time hilarious flaws… :-p
Actually you could get some endearing comedy out of that sort of thing.
“Second Life: Experience and create anything you can imagine… except shaking hands.”
I just assumed that the “marketing push” was “pushing an unstable broken V3 viewer out the door to support the new as-yet-still-closed premium-only gaming crap.
well i will put forth that since these things in the video were made, they CAN be made, and then they can be sold and then added to the general pool of stuff you can do! Us scripters are constantly pushing SL forward for you guys and its fun!
I’ve also seen an ad lately for Linden Realms, with the free-play “play Linden Realms for free” slant.
Assuming this is what Rod meant at SLCC when he said that these new game features are for testing only and not to compete with its users.
Because advertising them, bill-boarding them at the login screen and destinations and giving away free Lindens doesn’t take any traffic and user time from user created spaces and games, right?
And where are those new game features that will be available to SL developers anyway?
@Maggie If you’re talking about Linden Realms, it became open to everyone a couple weeks back.
@Dartagan: We’re just waiting on the announcement of the feature list.
Fashion is a great hook, btw. How about this, “Buy the wardrobe of your dreams for pennies of what it would cost in real life!” hehe
Or “Play Barbies all over again at the age of 40! And you are Barbie!” hehe
Barbie?
@Yordie, now if LL could bring a GI Joe Adventure Team game to SL, complete with Kung-Fu grip, they’d have me for the big bucks:
“The NEW Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb! In Second Life by Hasbro!”
Seriously…a partnership with Hasbro or Mattel….
Those vampire ads are just embarrassing by a graphic’s standard. The first one had that badly alphaed hair and then they “fixed” that but they used a much lower resolution for the fix so now the whole thing just looks weird and low rez and too grainy. And the weird moon in the background on both??
Their marketing, including the latest vid and LR, makes me feel so embarrassed of being in SL. Even this in-your-face message: ‘hey, there are real people in SL’. No kidding? It feels so fake. Must be the legendary AIDA formula (Awkward, Immature, Disinformation, Accomplished). How can a misleading trailer, improve the first time experience? They forgot to lower the minimum age to.. what would match?… maybe, twelve-year-old.
I wish they would do a decent campaign, with a friendly voice-over, talking about basics with a self-deprecating approach – maybe a funny twist. Showing some beauty is fine, compared with some nice flash animations (like the beautiful commercials for Portals) and without this hyper-charged sparkling- and blurry-effects.
@ Tateru
Dunno if “shopping” in a virtual world (for real dollars) is big winner in times of a world wide financial crisis. Entertainment surely is, even in the worst and ongoing economical crisis people want to be entertained, and the entertainment industries boom. In so far the vampire avatar could be seen as some role model for sophisticated entertainment – which is free of charge and allows to let grown up fantasies run a bit astray. Not such a bad idea, i think.
But it´s teethless. LL could make a strength out of the sophisticated crazyness of the SL universe. But obviously LL still does recognise exactly this surrealistic crazyness being a weakness or something to be ashamed of, which is something i really don´t get.
@ Inara
Yay, “Your World. Your Imagination” is back and that´s good news, very good news.
Yeah those machinima are ridiculous. I’m starting to believe some of Linden Lab’s top-brass actually believes Second Life works that way if they’re rubber stamping putting it on the frontpage. I’m sure Rod has used SL enough to know it doesn’t, ‘least I hope. So I’m not sure why that wrench would be thrown in the conversion funnel towards long term users when all it makes for is word-of-mouthers like myself inviting people into Second Life having to tell them “Yeah things don’t really work that smoothly or simply.”
Perhaps some resources needs to be taken out of marketing and put into engineering. Seems logical when marketing constantly has to misrepresent Second Life as to avoid showing it for what it truly is.
I’d rather that SL advertised it’s differences rather than being a ‘me too’ place.
About the tightly choreochraphed machinima add: Come on, kids. It’s like complaining about Lego commercials in which the lego dolls are moving, while IRL they’re dead pieces of plastic. Or the illustration on the box being far more realistic than the graphics of the 80s computer game cartridge inside. The SL differences being far less dramatic.
It’s inherent to marketing.
I, for one, welcome our new vampire noob minions, and love to show then there’s so much more than pyramid biting schemes.
We’re all smart enough to know Legos aren’t really alive. We’re smart enough to know Coca-Cola doesn’t give polar bears human intelligence every holiday season. No one expected ET for Atari to have the same graphics potential as the movie.
All of that is different than a person coming to try Second Life and seeing in a machinima that they can high-five with ease, twirl in midair and instantly change wardrobes with ease and actually believe thats how it works All of the things shown in the trailer are reasonable expectations. Its not like it was a trailer of real people being digitized into Second Life a-la the Matrix and we’re bitching about that. Its about Second Life being misrepresented as being as smoothly functional as it should be, but isn’t.
Marketing photography has always been about deception, look at the big macs that always appear in McDonald’s commercials. Movie trailers also follow this pattern, often showing 10-15 seconds of action, what isn’t revealed is that those 10-15 seconds are the only action in the film, more damning still, they often use footage that doesn’t even appear in the film.
None of this makes what the lab is doing right, but if it’s going to compete in the world of advertising, it’s a whole different standard of right and wrong.
It would indeed be interesting to see parodies of those video ads showing what really happens when newbies try doing the things advertised.