Second Life Lures Big Brother, Older Traffic

The reality show Big Brother is coming to Second Life, writes Reuters. More details on the dedicated website. The show will select 15 contestants to spend at least eight hours in a transparent house for one month. It begins on December 1.

It won't be the first in-game rendition of the show, though. Fan players of The Sims have put together a few seasons worth of in-game shows already. Here's one Sim Brother site with pictures and transcripts, and here's something of a compendium on the issue. and a random YouTubed episode. Here's a triple cross-over of The Sims, Big Brother and Survivor called Bobopolis.



On a loosely related note, HitWise notes the spike in traffic to Second Life's site, and more people over 45 have been visiting it over the past month: "The over 55 group grew to 15.05% of SecondLife.com visitors, while the 18-24 group dropped 7 percentage points to 25.67%."

Planners Get Hooked on Transmedia

The concept of transmedia planning, described by MIT/CMS/C3's Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture, is finding fans among agency planners. In a nutshell, "There would be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels could be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create an larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves," writes Faris Yakob, a strategist at Naked; Jason Oke from Leo Burnett Canada takes it further.
-- via Influx

Advertising on IM User Names

"A Chinese company named 5Sai.com will provide short text adverts that users add to the end of their instant messaging names. Then, the company awards points to users who spend the most time online with that name."
-- techspot via adland

Earlier:
Context-Sensitive Ads on MSN Messenger
AOL Adds Advertising Robots to AIM

Viewers Annoyed by In-stream Ads

Monetize this. "More than 80 percent of Web video viewers polled by Forrester Research called in-stream ads -- placements that appear before or after clips -- "annoying" and 75 percent said they ignore them."
-- adweek

Stopping Junk Mail

There's this law in the US that was designed to prevent porn junk mail, but since porn is in the eyes of the beholder, you can claim you are sexually aroused by the Publishers Clearing House's missives and file a complaint.

Junk Busters: "The court didn't like the idea of the employees of the USPS deciding for the nation what is erotically arousing and what isn't. It avoided the question of erotica completely by ruling that you decide what's junk: "the addressee [has] complete and unfettered discretion in electing whether or not he desired to receive further material from a particular sender." To make their ruling absolutely clear, they said that you can stop a "dry goods" (clothing) catalog if you want."
-- via pleasing to remember

Ad Layers on HD DVD Movies

image: NYTimes/Universal Studios

Even though the penetration of high-def DVD is still low and the format battle rages on, studios eye the high capacity medium's potential for new ad revenue.

NY Times: "The extra space gives the studios room not only for high-definition video and enhanced audio, but also for a bevy of interactive features, including games, picture-in-picture commentaries and Web links.

Some car chases in movies are so over the top that you might find yourself mentally trying to add up the cost of all the wreckage. Now Progressive Direct will do the math for you. It teamed up with Universal Studios Home Entertainment to insert a running tally of the destruction into the recent release of "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" on high-definition DVD. As cars smack into one another in Tokyo, a display in a small window keeps track: Roof repair: $209; taillights: $451; fender: $618."

Offtopic: Monday Coffee

Deeppresso is Coca-Cola's coffee brand in Asia. Happy Monday.

-- Japan-related blogs. Here, for example.

MIT Students Sell Space Ads

To raise money for their small unmanned spacecraft, MIT students are selling ad space on its surfaces, one centimeter at a time in the Million Dollar Home Page fashion.

Boston Globe writes, "On the YNIS spacecraft, there are 121,866 square centimeters for sale inside and outside the satellite, which is about as tall as a washing machine and as long as a Ford Focus. he YNIS spacecraft has better neighborhoods than others. The cheapest property is the "introductory" zone at edges of the satellite's solar panels (It burns up in space, unfortunately.) while the more expensive "bronze" and "silver" zones on the exterior are photographed in orbit by cameras mounted on the solar panels."

Branded Visualizations

Some time ago, I wrote about advertising with Winamp skins, and here's a newly discovered twist. Music Visuals is creating branded visualizations -- those trippy animations pulsating to the beat -- and has done work for BP (above), Batman Begins, Microsoft and Budweiser. This takes us one step closer to advertising through hypnosis.

How to Advertise in Second Life, Part 2

It looks like a fairly heated and a long overdue discussion on virtual world marketing is unfolding across SL-related blogs, so here's a a quick follow-up to yesterday's post with more links. (Brace for more SL news on Adverlab since the dedicated Brands in Games blog is undergoing some reconstruction. )

Business Week did a story last week filled with some hard numbers on what it costs to bring a company to (Second) Life. Quite a spread: $5,000 to $1M, and we are not talking Linden dollars here. As Prokofy Neva commented in SL Herald, "What a faint, distant memory that cover on BW in April featuring Anshe and her paltry $250,000 in Second Life, eh?"

Peter "Urizenus Sklar" Ludlow, founder and editor of the SL Herald, unleashes his wrath at the real-world marketers on the pages of Strumpette PR blog: "You don't blaze a path to the future by charging into a new space and ignoring what is happening around you, nor by recycling your old rust belt industrial design ideas in a new medium, and more importantly, if the discourse of cyberculture offends your delicate ears, then just keep the fuck away thank you very much." (Find more of his thoughts in SL Herald).

Wagner James Au, a long-time SL journalist, writes that "for the most part, real world companies and organizations are having neglible impact on Second Life society as a whole." He offers his observations of traffic stats to support the claim.

In a separate post, Wagner compares popularity of the new Nissan dealership in SL with a resident-run car business and found the traffic to Nissan way behind.

On a related note, the November issue of SL Business Magazine has an article on Amazon's efforts to bridge Second Life and it's own servers (mentioned earlier here).