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Jesse Shannon is the president of the premiere interactive marketing agency, SAJE Media. As a corporate citizen, he busted his chops in the dynamic world of video game production gaining working experience in Activision's Los Angeles and Tokyo offices. His most recent work as an employee was contracting with Honda on their ASIMO humanoid robot project spreading the good word on the coming personal robotics industry to the world (and Disneyland).

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Marketing’s New Manifestation: Why Avatars Best Represent Online User Engagement

Written on
July 17th 2006
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by Jesse Shannon  |
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New Line Cinema’s latest salvo from the Snakes on a Plane marketing launch pad is a media heavy website that features an online “media kit” where anyone can download a rich variety of wallpapers, AIM icons, audio clips or video clips to not only adorn their computer, but their personal websites as well. Little surprise then that the response has been so fast and strong. Days after launch, the site already has links to a myriad of user created content from Snakes on a Blog to Snakes on YouTube to Snakes on Myspace.

Obviously, net users are clamoring to help our campaigns by personally spreading the message about their favorite brands and bits of pop culture. The catch is, other users still have to go and visit all these fanatics’ MySpace pages or YouTube videos or blogs. Now, imagine if these user-generated campaigns could get up and “walk around” the community. Avatars allow for exactly this.

If an avatar in a virtual world is given the tools to adorn their online projections with brands and marketing messages, whole new levels of reach and personalization become available. A fan can not only put on a virtual Snakes on a Plane t-shirt or hat, they can go so far as to have snakes writhing around their avatars, video clips playing at their avatar’s personal dwelling, or even speak in the inimitable voice of Samuel L. Jackson and his already classic R-rated line that has spawned an army of devoted fans already.

Jay Goss, COO of Whyville.net, notes that “the social friction in a virtual world is much less than in the real world.” As an example, he cites the likelihood of strangers in a coffee shop walking across the room to talk to each other, versus the likelihood of two people across from each other in a virtual room striking up a conversation. Anyone who has spent some time in a virtual chat room will immediately understand this point. The shyness factor in these virtual spaces drops down to nearly zero, and as a result people that end up in the same virtual space are much more likely to interact with each other compared to those same two people ending up in the same real world space.

The result of this lower social friction is a much more fluid information exchange. The speed at which a meme (viral idea) or brand or marketing message can spread through a virtual world from avatar to avatar is breathtaking. Entire communities can be overtaken in the space of a week, if not days. From the perspective of crafting an effective campaign message, the potentials for extremely quick testing phases seems like a no-brainer.

So, is it worthwhile to invest time and money into these nascent virtual worlds and begin marketing to the digital avatars that inhabit them? If you are willing to take the time to understand these virtual meeting spaces, and craft messages that are compatible, then the answer is a resounding yes. Beyond the incredible metrics opportunities that come with a digital person and the tracks that they leave through a digital world, the speed and engagement that comes with marketing to an avatar are unmatched.

From a marketer’s perspective, the only limit becomes our own creativity and our ability to convince advertisers that it is ok to give up some control of their brand. This may be the most difficult aspect of marketing to avatars. To allow a brand to enter a virtual world and “walk around”, the brand must be placed in the hands of the avatar and its creator.

While constraints on its use can be applied by the owners of the virtual world, there will always be some unpredictability involved. A user may do something silly like take a pair of Nike branded shoes and put them on their virtual horse, or worse, a member of the community could mount a protest against the branding by creating a virtual sweatshop with Nikes piling up outside.

However, these kinds of things can happen to a brand with or without official involvement. Face parts for sale in Whyville feature logos from a variety of brands and companies, and tracking and removing all of these is of course possible, but not necessarily beneficial. If anything, officially offering a brand in a virtual world will probably afford an advertiser more control over their brand’s appearance in the world than if there were no official involvement.

The effectiveness of an avatar’s ability to spread a message is not in dispute. The difficulty lies in how we can offer the message to these avatars in a way that is interesting to them, and beneficial to our advertiser’s brand. The answer to that question is what marketers need to be figuring out, instead of wasting time wondering whether or not this exciting new marketing paradigm changes things. It already has.



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Reader Comments.

i need customize yahoo mesenger returnedto my yahoo avactor icon

Posted by Frances Harrison | 6:12 pm on March 28, 2007.

i need customize yahoo mesenger returnedto my yahoo avactor icon

Posted by Frances Harrison | 6:12 pm on March 28, 2007.

Cool.

Posted by Kyriakos | 6:24 am on May 17, 2007.

interesting

Posted by Maximos | 7:10 am on May 22, 2007.

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