I had previously written about Virtual Worlds on my Tuple vs. Kipple blog while I was at the Electric Sheep Company in 2007. When ESC laid off 1/3 of their staff in December, they took down our blogs.
There are a few posts from Tuple vs. Kipple that I thought may still be interesting to folks, so I’ll repost them here. Here’s one: an interview I did with Frank Rose, who wrote an article critical of Second Life in the summer of 2007. I’ve written elsewhere of the importance of this article in the history of Second Life and to my knowledge, this is the only interview with the author in print commenting on his article.
The back story: a number of people Rose interviewed felt they he didn’t provide the whole story. One, Mike Donnelly of Coke, went public with his views at SLCC 2007. Others told me they spent a few hours with Rose, but he didn’t write about the positive aspects. As Rose told me in the interview below, “I heard the positive examples. They just frankly didn’t seem that positive to me.”
I don’t think I have anything new to add since I first posted this article on — can you believe this? — 9/11/07. So, I’m making this available again simply for the historical record.
======= Original Article Begins Here =======
In a previous post, I wrote about how Mike Donnelly of Coke discussed his efforts in Second Life and what he felt were media myths about them. He specifically took aim at Wired’s article, How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Second Life, explaining how he felt it did not fully represent his views. Frank Rose wrote the article.
I thought Frank Rose’s would have an interesting point of view, so I asked him for a 1/2 hour interview and he was kind enough to oblige. What follows is our phone interview from Monday, September 10th, 2007.
====== Interview ========
Q: Can you tell me how the article came to be?
A: It really started in a discussion with Chris Anderson [Wired’s Editor-in-Chief] and a couple of editors in the magazine. I had done an article on advertising in video games which ran with the Second Life piece, as it turned out. As we were discussing that — I had already done a draft of it [the advertising in video games piece] at that point — Chris brought up Second Life and we were discussing basically, “What’s going on with it?” He asked me to take a look at that with the idea that we would probably run the two of them together.
Q: What’s been Wired’s experience with Second Life, from a marketing point of view?
A: A couple of things. First off, I wasn’t directly involved in the early marketing stuff, so I don’t have first hand knowledge, but it’s obviously no secret that we did an in-world build there with Millions of Us. We have a headquarters near the C/Net build. Chris did an interview there about The Long Tail
last fall. I don’t think much has happened there since. I don’t think we’ve had - to my knowledge - any other events there.
Q: You’ve talked to a lot of people about SL — your article was rather critical — what do you think is the value of Second Life or other Virtual Worlds? Is there a value, or no?
A: I think potentially yes, there is a lot of value. I think Second Life is a not that great iteration of the idea. I don’t really mean to be critical of the Linden Lab people, I think they were working with serious constraints, not the least of which was money. I think there’s something to be said for their trying to bootstrap it as opposed to going out and getting lots of venture capital, or trying to sell it before it was built. That said, they based it on a video game engine that was already out of date by the time they launched it.
I think another thing in all fairness to them is that they didn’t have any idea it was going to get as big as it did. Once it started to take off — even though we would perhaps disagree, people would disagree about how much it has taken off — certainly there’s no question that millions of people have tried it, quite a few people use it more or less regularly, and that it wasn’t really built for that number of people. For all those reasons, I think Second Life is problematic. I think the idea of Virtual Worlds nonetheless continues to be fascinating and will be something that continues to evolve.
Q: Why do think there’s all this interest with Second Life?
A: A couple of things. There definitely was a lot of press hype about it, starting with the Business Week cover story. I wouldn’t characterize all the articles as hype by any means, but I think Business Week was a little over the top. At that point, aside from World of Warcraft, which is different–it has very strong game elements–Second Life was the only thing that was on people’s radar.
Q: Why do you think it’s become part of our culture? Even Doonesbury had a strip on it yesterday.
A: [Laughs] I didn’t see that, actually! Because the media picked it up so much. In a way it’s become a touchstone. There’s obvioulsy a large number of people who dislike it, or feel that it’s a waste of time on a personal level, or whatever, just on a personal level. There’s obviously also a large number of people who really enjoy it and feel some kind of loyalty to it and in some cases an almost fanatical enthusiasm…which I don’t mean to be a negative. It’s become a bit of a lightning rod. As I’m sure you know, the same week our piece came out in Wired, Newsweek did a big article about how great Second Life is, so go figure.
Q: Where do you think you, Chris, the other people at Wired stand? Would you be neutral, or starting with a critical eye?
A: In terms of whether it provides a benefit to individual users or anything like that, I think that’s up to the users themselves. I’m certainly not going to tell people what to do. If people enjoy using it, that’s totally fine with me. I might add that extends to the sex stuff and free money and so forth. I don’t mind if people want to have virtual sex, whatever, we’re not at all moralistic about this.
What my article primarily focused on was Second Life as a marketing tool. There we felt that it was seriously overrated.
Q: Did you feel that going in, or did you discover that after talking to folks?
A: I suspected it going in, but I wasn’t sure. As you know, I talked to a pretty wide range of people including both Electric Sheep and Millions of Us. And Joe Jaffe. Several clients, some of whom were quoted, some of whom were not. And a number of observers that are savvy in the marketing business. There were certainly campaigns in Second Life that made more sense than others, but the fundamental–bottom line, if you will–seemed to me to be that there wasn’t a great deal of benefit to it, as I said in the end, other than learning about Second Life.
I don’t think that’s going to be the case necessarily for Virtual Worlds, in general. I think that’s largely to do with Second Life’s limitations in its architecture and its number and makeup of people who use it on a regular basis.
Q: Is the criticism that people are taking a “Build it and they will come” attitude? What’s the failure?
A: That’s certainly one of the major failures, I think. That said, I don’t think that’s the case with everybody whose done something there. I think that’s the case with some people. I know that from the people I talked with at Electric Sheep, they were fairly clear about the fact that building something and issuing a press release about it and getting a lot of media play were over. There were other people I talked with who did not make that distinction, who still felt that PR you get from building something would still get you as much milleage as it did a year ago.
I thought that within the limitations of Second Life, I thought the Electric Sheep approach was fairly sophisticated. I just didn’t think that on balance, spending a lot of money, or more to the point, a lot of time, on Second Life was going to be beneficial for that many companies.
Q: Which brings us to Coke. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was because I saw Mike Donnelly of Coke talk at the Second Life Community Convention. A lot of his presentation was, “Wired went too far on the negative side. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s some of the myths and here’s what we’re doing and why.” He said, “I feel like a sacrificial lamb.” Have you had an opportunity to read his criticisms of your article?
A: I read your blog post, which I thought was quite interesting. I was not at the conference of course, so I don’t know the details of what he said.
Q: So what did you find interesting about his response?
A: First off, I think the sacrificial lamb thing–I’m not going to comment on this aspect of what Donnelly said. But I think you’ll be hard put to find a major corporate marketing manager — who spends well into the six figures if not more on anything — who is going to admit that it was a failure. Or that it didn’t meet their objectives. To a certain extent, I feel like Donnelly has to defend his judgement–which is fine.
In terms of what I quoted him as saying in the piece? I think he would agree, I did not lead him on. It certainly wasn’t I who suggested going to the Aloft hotel build was like being in The Shining. What happened when I did that interview, which was a phone interview– by the way–he’s smart and entertaining and a good talker–as I noted in the piece he’s done a number of things that Coke has really benefited from. He’s clearly a pretty Internet savvy person, judging if nothing else from his response to the Diet Coke Mentos videos–which I thought was quite savvy. When I put the phone down and looked over my notes, I realized, there were two things going on. On the one hand he was professing some enthusiasm about Second Life, or at least Coke’s opportunities there. And at the same time, he was almost–despite himself, perhaps–noticing and observing all of these facts–or making these observations–that did not back up his enthusiasm. Such as The Shining comment. I felt like there was almost kind of a willful attempt to believe, despite the evidence. I sort of felt the same way with the NBA commissioner, who admitted upfront that–unlike Donnelly–he’s not a particularly web savvy person. He’s just looking for the new thing.
Looking at these two and other people and the sort of range of information and interpretations I was getting from people who were doing in-world builds, I began to feel that there was a lot less here than meets the eye, so to speak.
Q: It’s been about six weeks or so since the article was published. Any new insights, or anything that came up as a result of the article?
A: I’m sure you’re familiar with James Au’s comments on his blog. He emailed me. I responded to him. Frankly, I did not think his initial comments were very well thought out. He subsequently had an email exchange with Chris Anderson in which he made the point that if you looked at ordinary websites that same way you look at Second Life, there wouldn’t necessarily be a lot of activity all at the same time either. I would tend to be a little more critical of the argument than Chris was. My feeling being that there’s a big difference. In Second Life, you expect to have interactions. On a website, you’re only interested in the site itself. Obviously, there are message boards and that sort of thing, ecommerce sites, and so forth, but that’s primarily the focus. Maybe there’s something to learn from that. Maybe to make a Virtual World work, you really need a much larger critical mass than Second Life has at any given time. One of the draw backs — and in a certain sense, one of it’s advantages — is that it’s a completely global phenomenon. On a percentage basis, the US is rather under represented. For a global brand like Coke, that’s not such a big concern, but someone like Coldwell Banker, it probably would be. In any case the other thing that implies, is that people are going to be using it 24 hrs a day. There’s not going to be a lot of down time on it, but there’s not going to be times when there’s a huge number of users relative to the total base are going to be on it.
Q: Certainly, people must have talked about events as a strategy?
A: Indeed, they did. Events make more sense than anything else. That’s what was more impressive about the Electric Sheep approach than most of the other people that I talked to…which was your emphasis on events. I think if you’re going to do something in Second Life you’re almost always going to have some series of in-world events to make it worthwhile. That said, there are such serious server limitations on the number of people that can be accommodated on any one time, that kind of presents a problem. I’m sure sooner or later, that will be overcome.
Q: It seems to me a lot of the criticism is similar to the web at the Mosaic browser stage, or maybe even up to Internet Explorer 1.0. Do you think that statement’s valid? That we’re looking at the beginning of a new medium?
A: I think it’s potentially looking at the beginning of a new medium. In terms of marketing efforts, what I would say to that is, that for most companies, 1994, 1995, 1996–even into 1999 and 2000–it certainly made sense to have a presence on the web, but it certainly didn’t makes sense to put a lot of money into it. Certainly not to do major advertising campaigns on it. Hence, the great Internet bust of 2000. I think that whatever happens with Virtual Worlds — I do think they’re destined to evolve and frankly, I think they have a long way to go — I think they’ll probably get there — it’s one thing to be a pioneer and to make it happen, or to be part of the experiment. It’s another thing to expect a lot of marketing results as a result of it.
Q: Of the people you talked to, do you think they expected great marketing results? Or, did they look at it as an experiment?
A: I think there was a range. I think, frankly, many of the clients I spoke to didn’t have much idea what to expect. To the extent that they were doing other things online that made a great deal of sense — I certainly don’t care if they want to put some money into Second Life — I think where the real problem comes in is — there’s a lot of naive corporate marketing people out there. I think Second Life becomes something that is–people have the illusion that it’s really easy to understand because it’s so much like first life — it’s sort of a one-to-one analogy. The problem with digital marketing is that it’s far more complicated than that. in it’s current incarnation, Second Life really doesn’t have the sophistication to account for that. The sort of direct mail analogy for online marketing in general–one-to-one contact, community elements, forums, people talking back to you about your products — that’s sort of missing from Second Life in this point. That’s a problem.
Look, if Coke wants to spend money in Second Life, I certainly don’t care. Coke is smart enough — and Michael Donnelly specifically — will do other things that stand him in good stead. I think the real problem is with more naive companies or marketers think this takes them off the hook in terms of digital marketing. It’s barely the beginning, would be my feeling.
Q: What do you mean, “Takes them off the hook?” Like, “OK, we participated in that–we don’t have to think about it anymore?”
A: Exactly.
Q: I think to characterize people’s attitude in the business is, “Yeah, we know about all the problems. But what about the good things? What about the positive aspects as well?” That was the feeling [in regards to your article] and that’s why I wanted to hear your point of view, especially after writing about Donnelly.
A: Right. I heard the positive examples. They just frankly didn’t seem that positive to me. As you know, I did spend a lot of time /w/ the Electric Sheep people. Sibley is very smart and interesting person. I feel that his commitment to Virtual Worlds is quite genuine and quite interesting. I just found in the end — my feeling was, Second Life was a bit of a trap for most corporations.
====== End Interview ========
Frank and Chris’ technical criticisms are valid and something we spend our times trying to alleviate–as is Linden Lab. However, many of those criticisms do have solutions.
So what’s going on here? Seems to me, Wired made the classic mistake in Second Life marketing: build it and they will come. They had no event strategy, except for Anderson’s Long Tail lecture, which would have been a GREAT kickoff to a series of talks. Why build an auditorium if not to use it?
Certainly, Wired writers have a lot to say and are good interviewers. They would have no shortage of interesting speakers/interviewees. Instead, they fumbled…as many companies do.
Without a living, on-going marketing strategy, it’s no wonder they were unhappy with the results. Theirs would make a great case study on how not to market in Virtual Worlds–or social media. But it’s not too late. I could see where they could create an active, ongoing series that would add value to the community and as well as drive magazine subscriptions, sponsorships, and advertising.
Many of their writers are book authors; they could host readings in-world. Indeed, my colleague Giff Constable has written about how our client, Bantam, has had successful readings in Second Life, so it’s a proven model. Also, there are any number of gadgets Wired could produce that are on-brand and give people great utility. Why? To sell advertising or increase subs. Success is about starting with the company’s brand values and translating them appropriately into a Virtual World. Oh…and management buy-in.
There’s a lot to learn from both sides of the conversation. Thank you Frank Rose for speaking with me. I appreciate you and Wired continuing the conversation.
