IBM moves into Second Life.

von | Nov. 11, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News

At Reuters there is a story of IBM moving into virtual worlds such as Second Life – with a considerable budget:

IBM is ramping up its push into virtual worlds with an investment of roughly $10 million over the next 12 months, including an expanded presence within the popular 3D online universe Second Life.

Now that is scary. Considering the still relatively small size of SecondLife, such an investment seems enormous. On the other hand, people already spend almost $1 mio. per day. (I had to check twice, coz I couldn’t believe it!) And who knows how much they’ll really spend in Second Life?
Apparently they have been active in this space already:

IBM has already established the biggest Second Life presence of any Fortune 500 company. It uses the world primarily for training and meetings but has also built a simulation of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

One thing I found interesting, as further on they write about the adoption of VR within the regular internet user base:

„The essence of e-commerce today is built around the idea of catalogs. That’s very useful, it fits with the idea of Web pages and catalog pages, but most people don’t think of shopping in terms of catalogs and pages, but in terms of stores that they go into,“ said IBM chief technology strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

Well, I don’t necessarily agree with what Irving is hinting at. Switching on the computer and logging on to a virtual world still isn’t the same as visiting a real store to go shopping. Not with todays user interfaces anyway, which lack 3D presentation and have no haptic sensation at all.
But I am sure we will get there. It’s just a matter of T&T (time&technology), as always. And most likely we’ll someday smile when we look back at the days when we had to surf the net with screens, mice and keyboards, moving in a two-dimensional space with most of the content displayed in writing. I hope I will remember to link back to this post, once this has become reality.

(via PSFK)

DIGITAL UTOPIA / A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet

von | Nov. 11, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News

In an article with the headline „DIGITAL UTOPIA A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet“ Dan Fost writes about the Hippie-esque dream of the social web:

Dubbed Digital Utopians by some, and Web 2.0 innovators by others, this latest wave of tech gurus champion community over commerce, sharing ideas over sharing profits. By using Web sites that stress group thinking and sharing, these Internet idealists want to topple the power silos of Hollywood, Washington, Wall Street and even Silicon Valley. And like countless populists throughout history, they hope to disperse power and control, an idea that delights many and horrifies others.

All very idealistic, and considering the following quote, Web2.0 seems to simply follow on an ageless debate:

The core of the Web 2.0 movement resurrects an age-old debate about governance and democracy, one that was argued by political philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville: Are the benefits of democracy — taking advantage of what Web 2.0 proponents call the wisdom of the crowds — worth risking the dark side of mob rule?

Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term, doesn’t quite see it that way:

Yet while people, perhaps reacting to the greed that fueled the IPOs of the dot-com years, saw in Web 2.0 a chance to create a new collectivism, O’Reilly said, „I don’t see it that way at all.“

Web 2.0, he says, is about business.

He says many tech movements start out with similar idealism, only to give way to capitalism. For instance, O’Reilly says, Napster introduced file sharing, but now iTunes has people comfortable with paying for music online.


Interesting article, and an inspiring (yet rather useless) discussion.

Where did you loose 50% of your ad budget?

von | Nov. 11, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising

Marketing.fm wants to revise a famous quote by John Wanamaker:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. -John Wanamaker, US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)

I know the quote, of course, as I suppose everyone in advertising does. But I didn’t know it was of someone as unknown as this chap. On the contrary, I was almost tempted to assign the quote to Mark Twain, purely because lately if feels like most thoughtful quotes come from Mark Twain, as if he is some sort of a quote-goat anytime people don’t know the real source.

In the same blog post, they write:

The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc.
Is it time that we revised the 50/50 Wanamaker quote? Should it be more like 70/30 now?

I ain’t sure that the hard measurements that the web provides, should redefine investments alone. This might sound strange coming from someone working in digital marketing. But if you think about it: applying these measurements, you de-value the web to a purely interactional medium (which it is, most of the time, admittingly). However, by that you omitt all the effects of the contacts people have with your brand that cannot be exactly measured:

  • The impression an ad made with that one page view, even if the user didn’t click on it.
  • time spent interacting with the ad piece all together
  • triggered purchase consideration, fulfilled in brick&mortar store

Online Advertising can be measured and therefore it should be. Always.
But we should not forget, that there are so called key performance indicators that can help us understand the effect of advertising, and that can’t be measured by interaction, but purely by qualitative research. Asking the target audience about their perception of the brand, the channel interaction, etc.
Classical Advertising has been working with this kind of research all the time. And while it never helped to solve the puzzle of where the 50% of investments „got lost“, I think, purely relying on data measured through interaction, will not help either. It sounds more like a quick fix of Marketeers trying to answer tough questions by providing hard results – irrespectively of context.

Google’s CPG Blog

von | Nov. 9, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, SEO / SEA

German Blogger Robert Basic points me to a new blog by Google, which does not promote Google services, but instead it writes about how the CPG industry is tackling online marketing. Which makes this whole blog a service to this industry. And lets us guess about the relative importance of this industry for Google…

Our motto: all the news from Google’s ad team that fits in your fridge or pantry…and maybe a little bit more. […] Our sales teams are organized by industry so that we can focus on the distinctive qualities and business needs of our advertisers and marketers.

[..] Our goal for the blog is to communicate with you, our advertisers and agencies. We’ll talk about the ways in which CPG is tackling the changing world of online marketing and how we work with advertisers to create the best experience for their customers. We’ll also strive to keep you on top of relevant news from Google that can affect CPG.

A good idea. But will people read it? Only the long tail run can tell us.