Disney’s ToonTown Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Although Disney has opened this game to people of all ages, it is clearly geared toward children 12 years of age or younger. With ToonTown’s user base steadily growing, they recently made the decision to open the game for marketing and advertising.

About ToonTown:

ToonTown offers both free accounts and membership accounts. In order to make gameplay more “exclusive,” Disney made the chat feature available only to members. For those with free accounts, there is ”speed-chat”, which essentially allows users to quickly select from preset phrases. Normal chat can only be used between two players and they must both enter a password (which must be told outside of the game, to ensure that only friends chat together).

It is my belief that the game is open to all ages in order to allow parents to monitor the gameplay of their children, since the game is very clearly designed for youngsters. However, after opening the game to advertisers, Disney may continue to leave the game “open to all ages” so that marketers and advertisers can more easily monitor the sucesses of their marketing efforts.

Advertisers:

Even though Disney has opened up to marketers, I couldn’t find any sign of an advertisement for anything other than Disney itself. So, it doesn’t look like any companies have jumped on that band wagon yet. 

My opinion is that the problem lies in the fact that only small children play the game - meaning most companies that would be interested in advertising in ToonTown would have products for children. This could present a problem for Disney since the most likely companies to advertise children’s products come from rivaling television networks (e.g. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon) - as many popular children’s toys are the result of merchandising for those network’s television shows. Since the major children-geared companies are rivals with Disney they may not be willing to advertise (or even if they wanted to Disney might have something to say about it). This could leave only the smaller children’s companies who might not have the marketing dollars to allocate for advertising in such an emerging medium as virtual worlds.

My Two Cents:

Although advertising in this game wouldn’t be HARD to do, finding an advertiser who isn’t a rival company may prove difficult for the Disney empire. If you’d like more info about Disney’s ToonTown, visit: http://play.toontown.com/about.php.

The buzz over the past year has been that more and more, digital shops will start winning the overall global accounts and will dictate creative/strategy for the client, rather than the traditional shops winning the account and then siphoning off a percentage of the budget to the digital folks.

I feel like I’ve been somewhat of a traitor to my people on this one because I just haven’t been able to get on board and agree that we (interactive) should be leading the way. The other day I had breakfast with a colleague from a traditional agency in town and he brought up a recent client he heard of that chose a digital shop to manage its account over a traditional shop - and this was one of the biggest companies on the planet! But even still I just couldn’t see it, how could a client, which let’s say has a $100MM+ budget, decide to use a digital agency to lead the charge when most likely less than 20% of that budget will go to the digital side (and honestly, 20% is pretty generous)? How would a digital-focused agency be able to give direction to the traditional folks when they have such disdain for that side of the house?

Ah, but now I get it. In an article this month in Adweek, the writer tackles this subject and what struck me was the quote by Dare planning partner John Owen. He said:

The digital age is about the democracy of a good idea which can come from anywhere, including the consumer. So it’s about being more open and more collaborative, and having respect for the consumer’s contribution. Traditional agencies are used to control rather than collaboration and that’s where they are coming unstuck because they are finding it difficult to adapt to the new ways of working.

That’s it! It’s not necessarily that ideas that are interactive/web-based are more important than traditional media (though I’d love to debate that one), but more so that we as interactive agencies understand the new way to interact with the consumer. Traditional shops, because of their mediums, have almost no way of appreciating how powerful consumer interaction and collaboration can be. Digital shops get that, and that’s why they are continuing to take over.

Seen Ice Rocket yet? Yeah, its yet another search engine. It’s hard to turn around these days without running into a new search engine. I posted a while back about the newly designed Ask.com which I think is actually a great spin on search. Interestingly, I haven’t used it much since then. For some reason Google has some kind of hold on me that I can’t shake. It’s like that old group of friends from back in the day that you just can’t get away from, even though you know they’re no good and you should move on with your life but instead you set them up in your pad in Virginia so they can run illegal dog-fighting rings and then you’re not allowed to show up at training camp because you’re being indicted and…

Focus, Jeff, focus…ok, back on track. I’m not advocating that Ice Rocket is the new place you need to start your search (I haven’t really used it more than a few times so far), but they have started to make me realize how easy it is to take almost anything online and tie it into social networking/Web 2.0/etc. Check this out, when I search for “spunlogic” in their blog category, I get the following:

Notice the tabs they have which I’ve shown in their drop-down state. The first one I show is the “Subscribe” tab which allows you to create an RSS feed based on that search. Amazingly simple but who else is doing that? I quickly added this search to my Google homepage which looks like this:

Now I’ll be able to see the latest mentions of Spunlogic in blogs without having to go and run a new search. The second tab I highlighted is the “Share” tab, which allows me to share this search with other people. I added it to my Facebook page (which by the way, feel free to add me as a friend in Facebook), and it looks like this:

Now people that visit my Facebook page can see the same search results.
There are two points here that I think are important. First, the Web 2.0 phenomenon can seem very confusing to marketers but if you really think about it, there are very simple ways to take advantage of these things. Don’t over complicate it, just give people the ability to consume/share your content in the ways they are comfortable.

Which leads me to my second point - please stop trying to create your own social networks! People don’t want or need yet another place to create a profile and invest in another place to keep up with their friends and contacts. Instead, go where the user is. Allow them to add your content to the places they are already familiar with.

Back in June, NBC’s dotcomedy.com launched The Lunch Break Show, a new diversion for those of us that eat at our desk to save time during the day. Arby’s was the sole sponsor and the site is plastered with Arby’s branding and links to their TV commercials. Although it seems to have hit the news release channels back in June, I only recently stumbled across it and found it interesting enough to share the links and some thoughts for any of you who might have missed it the first time around.

The Concept:
The top of the original press release states quite obviously where the idea came from: “According to a recent survey by Kelton Research, nearly 60 percent of office workers in the U.S. spend their lunch breaks at their desks looking for distractions.”

So, it seems that NBC and Arby’s decided to go after this target market by throwing together a 30-minute collection of short segments taken from the previous day’s comedy shows on NBC and inviting office workers to ‘tune in’ between 12:00pm and 2:00 pm to watch the show while eating lunch at their desk.

The Experience:
Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser outside the time of 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see a page that explains quickly what the show is about and a form to register for email alerts each day before the show begins that only requires a Zip Code and an Email. There is also a countdown to the next show.

Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser between 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see the video which loops through the 30 minute segment repeatedly, along with a funny little PANIC button.

Thoughts:
I love the idea, it got me interested enough to try it out, but I had some problems with the experience.

Design - I enjoyed the website design and loved the funny little Panic button that pops-up a screen with numbers and lines all over it to make it look like you are doing something important.

Email Reminder - The email comes at 9:30am for me, and there is no way that is going to help me remember the show at lunch. It is buried in my email by that time, and I have to consciously think about the show and go and dig up the email to find the link. (If I haven’t bookmarked or tagged it already)

The Video – The video has some great spots in it each day, and I can always find something to chuckle at. However, you can’t pause it, rewind it, or skip ahead. Here comes the rub. I get what they are trying to do. However, I find it hard to believe that the same people who are clicking around online for entertainment at lunch can’t pause and rewind TV at home with some sort of DVR. I found it very frustrating. A colleague came up to me and asked a question during the show, and I missed something I wanted to hear, and couldn’t pause it or rewind it and I wasn’t about to wait another 30 minutes to catch that segment again.

So to wrap things up, I enjoyed the website and the video, but ultimately got turned off by the lack of ability to interact with the video. I wonder what their drop-off statistics look like because it feels as if they missed the mark a bit on how their demographic would want to interact with the site once they actually got there.

Links:

• To give credit where credit is due, I stumbled across it here at MediaPost in an article that gives a few facts about the campaign.
• The original press release
• Lunch Break Show FAQ

Or Fox River Penitentiary, because I think I know a way out.

This video about a Filipino prison was passed to me by frequent comment poster TS aka Brian Westbrook aka Steve Wilson, and because he suggested I spread the word on this thing and because I just can’t believe it really happened, I had to post it. This again falls in that category of “how do I tie this in to interactive marketing”. I mean, its an online video and without Youtube I doubt we’d ever get to see things like this, but as with my last post I’m not going to try too hard to tie it in. As JJ (another appreciated, frequent comment poster on this blog) pointed out in my last post, it’s not always critical to make sure that my posts tie directly to the company, so I’m going to roll with that mentality.

So basically, just check out these crazy Filipino inmates re-enacting Thriller. I wish things around here were that organized - jeesh.

I would consider myself only a moderate RSS consumer. I use iGoogle (I’m suppressing a laugh at the name… maybe I’ll start referring to my blogging self as “iRyan”) as my default homepage in Firefox. It’s full, as you can imagine, because it doesn’t allow for the bulk that an RSS reader might - even with the tabs (which I rarely use). For someone like me who only reads articles if my surface level scan (a feature built into iRyan 1.0) detects something I like, it is a great tool in a limited capacity.

So I found out about AideRSS today. It’s an intelligent way to filter relevant information into a feed from your favorite sites. Something like this will help me, a moderate user, maximize the limited “front page news” that I consume. It could obviously help power RSS consumers as well, cutting down the hundreds of new articles to just a fraction of the really important ones you want to read.

Check it out here in their demo videos:
http://www.aiderss.com/blog/screencasts/introduction/
http://www.aiderss.com/blog/screencasts/rss-import/
http://www.aiderss.com/blog/screencasts/site-widgets/

From their site: “AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.”

I really like the widget they created as well, however I do not like their creepy little cat-thingy mascot:

While doing a little research on email marketing, I came across this nifty site called EmailStatCenter.com.  Since I found it to be helpful, I wanted to pass it along to you guys.  This site is the first centralized online repository of statistics and research specific to the email marketing industry, with a broad range of topics included. 

EmailStatCenter.com provides statistical information for those looking for quick facts, but also provides the name of the reports if you’d like to research further.  Let’s face it, if you’re trying to convince people there’s value to an email marketing program, stats will be extremely helpful in your argument.

Here are some facts that I found particularly interesting:

• Of the largest online retailers that send welcome emails, 69% of them send their welcome emails in HTML, while the remaining 31% sent theirs in text-only format. - Email Experience Council/RetailEmail.Blogspot (September 2006)
• 55.3% of marketers surveyed currently use, or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing. - Datran Media Research, “The 2007 Email Marketing Survey: Looking Forward” (2007)
• 56% of the world’s heaviest online advertisers revealed that they had budgeted significantly for landing-page A/B tests in 2007. -MarketingSherpa (2007)
• The majority of marketers annually allocate less than $250,000 to each of the discrete email functions of acquisition, retention and creative. - JupiterResearch “E-mail Spending and Governance 2007″ (2007)
• U.S. marketers spent $300 million on email in 2005. - 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, WebTrends
  

I was just in the middle of writing an email to our HR Director about how I keep seeing agencies post Youtube videos of their office space and that it might be time for us to do the same. We’ve got great space and I know that the work environment is very important to people - which is why we try to keep it that way. Then I thought, why not share the thought with the readers of this blog and see what they think. The email went like this:

=============================================

To: HR

Subject: recruiting / our office

Hey,

More and more people coming in to interview with us have researched us heavily on the web (or more and more people are admitting that, maybe they always have). And one of the things I have heard that impresses people the most about their first impression of Spun and subsequently one of the reasons they like being here is how cool our office space is.

Also, more and more agencies are doing things like this to show off their office space: (see the NY office of R/GA).

What do you think about us throwing something like this together? I think it might help people get a feel for what its like to work here before they even step in the door. We’d have to be careful not to create one of those extremely self-involved, “Look at me, look at me” videos that a lot of agencies create and make sure we do it for the right reason.

I read this on Slashdot this morning because I don’t read the NY Times …

“The NYTimes is running a story about an iPhone flaw that has been found and documented by researchers from Independent Security Evaluators. Attackers were able to gain full control of the iPhone either through WiFi or by visiting a website with malicious code. The exploit will be demonstrated at BlackHat on Aug. 2nd at 4:45pm. Until then, ‘details on the vulnerability, but not a step-by-step guide to hacking the phone, can be found at www.exploitingiphone.com, which the researchers said would be unveiled today.’”

Anyone hacked an iPhone lately? If so, what did you do with it? I would spam people with SMS and call my friend in Thailand for free.

In the last eight months, Second Life has grown like wildfire. Even since May, the world’s total number of avatars has grown from around 6 million to more than 8 million. This growth has made Second Life far and away the largest virtual social interaction world. And with so many brands in-world it looks like Second Life is running away with the competition. Hold up. For users interested in social interaction in virtual worlds, there may be life outside of Second Life.

As of June, more than 50 corporations use and have established a presence in Second Life. Just as some businesses have gotten in, though, some are jumping out. Wells Fargo recently left, and Starwood Hotels has plans to leave as well. Part of the reason is that as the world has gotten so big and there is such stiff competition for brand recognition, some companies are having trouble sustaining avatars’ attention. This could be good news for worlds like There.com, Kaneva and even China’s HipiHi.

Both Kaneva and HipiHi are still in their beta testing stages. However, There.com has emerged as a very possible alternative to Second Life, showing a significant amount of promise.

One interesting aspect of There, which currently has around one million users, is that they are targeting a slightly younger target audience. Many worlds - such as Second Life, HipiHi, and Kaneva - are shooting for the 18-to-34 demographic. More than two-thirds of There’s users are between 13 and 26. There also places higher restrictions on user-generated content. For instance, all objects created in-world must pass a review to ensure all content is appropriate (There is bound by PG-13 style content). Also, all clothing designed for avatars must follow “minimum coverage requirements.”

Despite a slightly younger target audience, There IS similar to Second Life because it is a true social networking world, not a game (like RuneScape  or Entropia Universe  where users are focused on tasks and objectives). There considers itself a true social networking destination, pitching the world as a place where users can “hang out and make new friends.” Some of the There’s activities include card games, a race track where users can challenge each other, paintball and trivia contests - all of which encourage social interaction. Despite having only a fraction of the users of Second Life, There is able to offer a world with more extensive social interaction opportunities.

In order to separate themselves from Second Life, There must find a niche as a better environment for close-knit social interactions. Users will be drawn to There if they will have a better social experience. However, There still has to focus on luring big brands to establish a presence in-world:

1. The more brands There is able to lure in, the more revenue the site will generate.
2. Users are more likely to stay if popular brands are present. Some analysts say it’s the numerous brands in world that have made it effective.

Ideally, There will find a balance as a world that places a premium on social interaction and one that is a home to big brands.

Marketing in There

The deal that There struck with MTV was consequential in the world’s continued growth. MTV originally started in Second Life, but has since jumped ship to create online environments that better complement its TV series. MTV hired There to create the sponsored worlds the Virtual Laguna Beach, and, more recently, a virtual version of The Hills. In these worlds users can hang out with the real-world cast of the popular MTV shows. “MTV networks is the first to recognize the potential for using social virtual worlds to enhance the viewer experience and build a stronger bond with the audience,” said Michael Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies, the creators of There.

Earlier last month, There yet again made headlines by partnering with Capitol Music Group. The partnership between There and Capitol Music Group works almost exactly like the partnership between BMG and Second Life. As part of that deal, BMG brought in artists like Ben Folds and Talib Kweli to perform on Media Island in Second Life, a complex that BMG opened. Through this project, Folds was able to promote his new album with two live performances.

The Capitol project will bring in stars like the Beastie Boys, Korn, Yellow Card, and rapper MIMS to perform in The Tower, a new nightclub that Capitol recently purchased from There. As an added perk for both users and performers, during each virtual show fans can purchase both virtual and real world band gear, ranging anywhere from a virtual t-shirt to an actual CD.

Capitol is very optimistic about the possibilities of the partnership. “We know that consumers are spending a lot of time in virtual worlds and There.com offers a completely new way to promote music, both emerging talent and recognized artists, allowing artists to really connect with their fan bases,” said Syd Schwartz, senior vice president of digital strategy for Capitol. “Virtual worlds also give us a new revenue channel to promote our artists and sell virtual and real branded merchandise to customers.”

Perhaps netting these projects represents a real advantage for There. Looking back at HipiHi and Kaneva - they each show strong potential for different reasons:

• Kaneva is one of the first worlds to blend aspects of a 2-D social networking site, such as MySpace or Facebook, with aspects of a virtual world.
• HipiHi is geared towards a booming Chinese population and has been dubbed the “Chinese Second Life.”

However, because both are still in the testing stage, these worlds are relatively unknown - pushing There far ahead of Second Life challengers. I believe it’s only a matter of time before we see more brands launching in There. And with the rest of the competition looking up at Second Life, it is unlikely that they will catch up any time soon. However, with smaller worlds continuing to grow, it is likely that brands will see that Second Life is not the only world in town.