Tag Archives: marketing

Second Life shocker: Avatars betray our true selves to marketers

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Photo: Mauro Monti/Flickr CC

You might think that each time you inhabit your World of Warcraft character, or Second Life avatar, you are escaping reality and being creative.

Truth is, you are doing neither.

By looking at an avatar’s physical characteristics, researchers now say, marketers “can form accurate personality impressions about targets.”

(“Targets,” in case you were wondering, are those individuals being targeted to receive advertising messages.)

From an announcement:

The findings support the premise that real-life companies that intend to expand to virtual worlds can use member avatars as a proxy for member personality and lifestyles. As a future research direction, avatars and other consumer-generated media could be used as the basis for targeting and segmentation of online consumers.

via Avatars as information: Perception of consumers based on their avatars in virtual worlds. Jean-François Bélisle. 2010; Psychology and Marketing – Wiley InterScience.

Dance vids include secret "signs"

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Jane McGonigal, a social networking marketeer who talks a lot about alternate realities, addictive games, positive psychology and (gods help us) “experience grenades” has come up with a very strange new game. In this video, the tech media darling dons an “Eyes Wide Shut”-type mask, and dances for the webcam, flashing messages to other participants in the game.

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more about “Avant Game: The Secret Guilty Sign“, posted with vodpod

No Picnic: Marketers plan for the future

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Photo: A different kind of picnic in Amsterdam. CC Mark van Woudenberg (http://flickr.com/people/mindcaster-ezzolicious/)

The speeches by leading futurists, celebrities like Sir Richard Branson, the yoga classes with Woody Harrelson: Picnic in Amsterdam is a great big party for the global technorati.

Futurist speaker Adam Greenfield at the conference next month will address the loss of privacy and independent thought caused by ubiquitous computing devices.

In an interview at the Picnic website, Greenfield describes how a mobile device might present you with map, minus a route through a bad neighborhood. In other words, it has already done some of your thinking for you.

Greenfield, a former PSYOP sergeant in the US Army’s Special Operations Command, is now head of design direction at Nokia.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1504359&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

more about “No Picnic: Marketers lay plans for th…“, posted with vodpod

Be on the lookout for "Minority Report" two-way ads

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Because they will be looking for you.

(Image: from the Ubicomp.org website. )

No need to wait. The technology already exists for interactive advertisements, which will see you, and make offers based on what they think about you. Hotels will feature the displays, from Samsung, in their lobbies this year.

Interactive advertising: A good thing?

Soon, a large advertising display will detect your round-shouldered frame several yards away, and offer you a coupon for a caffeinated pick-me-up. (That, or the display will see that you are about to take a swing at it, and call the cops.)



Cheerleader tryouts bumping hard news?

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UniversalHub blogger Brett knocks the Globe’s coverage of a local firefighter’s bust for weed possession, and says newsworthy images, such as mugshots, are taking a backseat to prettier pictures at Boston.com.

I’m not sure the stakes at so high on this particular story (the pot one), but I plan to share Brett’s observations with my journalism students on the other side of spring break.

Like Brett, I’ve been marveling (in a purely detached, analytical way) at the sexed-up photo galleries at Boston.com, from the cheerleader tryouts, below, to party shots like this.

Pats hold cheerleader auditions – Boston.com
Alanna Hicks, of Weymouth, stretched her arms and legs along with the other 300 aspirants. Judges will pare the field to 75 for a final tryout.
Essdras M Suarez / Globe Staff

What's wrong with this story?

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“Second Life” employee enjoys second life as a reporter; reads like a psyop

snapshot_002.jpg I’ve been trying to enjoy Second Life this week, as Markbaard Meredith. (That’s me visiting the Star Trek museum.)

Bt first: I am mystified that this is what passes for an embedded journalist in SL:

W. James Au
From April 2003 to February 2006, I was a contract writer for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, primarily hired by the company to cover SL as an embedded journalist in an emerging society– its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions, along with larger themes of identity, social norms and organization, and cultural expression important to online worlds in general.

That contractual relationship has ended, but the story continues here.

That means Au was a paid marketing person for Linden Lab for almost three years. Yet he has kept his title seamlessly through his rebirth as a journalist.

Au continues to publish a positive overall message about the brave new world he helped to build.

Au (below) appears to have to have we-make-money-not-art charmed.

A blogger quotes Au: “SL is an international cutting edge creative space with high barriers to entry.”

In other words, the message is: Second Life is where the cool people hang out. Anyone who has explored SL knows this is preposterous, although there are excellent artists like John Craig Freeman working inworld.

But Au’s challenge, and invitation, should make more inworlders out of us.