So here is the story, I went searching for advertisements in the virtual world There.com the same way I do with most of the other worlds I’ve been assigned to find marketing and advertising in. My process is this: I go through the tutorial, I search the starting area, and then I talk to people to learn if anyone is aware of ads off the top of their heads. Then I navigate the rest of the world on my own in search of any signs of in-world branding.

Finding advertising in There.com took an especially long time since the world is actually quite large. However, as you’ll see, what I found in my exploration of the world is a blend of real advertising and user-generated product placement.

The Tower is a virtual world club where bands play and people come to listen, dance, and talk. This is just one example of a band that was playing in-world while I was researching.

I found a bunch of people wearing X-Games t-shirts and even came across X-Games-branded hoverboards. Are they holding their own version of the X-Games in There.com? Or, are they just using the game to promote them?

This was one of the arcades I came across. I did notice that the names on the video games were changed, likely to avoid copyright infringement.

Advertisements on benches are common in real life (or RL, as we say in virtual world speak). Apparently they’re also popular in There.com.

Yes, this is a Playstation 2 on top of the Television. The Sony logo on the side is missing (replaced by some illegible logo) - but it’s clear as day that’s what it is.

Again, changing the name slightly on the product, this can of “RAID” bug killer, has been modified to R.AID bug killer. (Oh, and just in case you were wondering … my avatar is wearing a fox costume and a jetpack … hey, an avatars gotta have some fun.)

It drives me crazy how much the product names/logos change in this world. But, hey, it’s still advertising a product. Here I am actually behind the counter of a bar looking at a Carona (Corona) sign.

There.com is a very large virtual space. In fact, as I was wrapping up my research I discovered that there were four or five other islands that I didn’t even know about.

Still, as I continued to explore I kept finding more and more examples of advertising in-world. And, since much of it was user-manufactured, there are real opportunities for the actual brands to come in with legitimate branding.

While inside the virtual world known as Habbo Hotel, I found it to be no trouble at all to obtain screenshots of advertisements, inside and outside of the world. I was able to uncover five main types of advertising in Habbo Hotel. Here they are …

1. Billboards. There were tons of places with billboards that you could click to take you to the website that they advertised for. Billboards appear to be the most common type of advertising in Habbo Hotel and certainly the most obvious.

2. Hotel Branding. This is not quite as obvious as a billboard. Companies instead avertise their product by branding a hotel in their name - so users see it clearly when they enter the space to visit with their friends. This reminds me a little of real-life branded venues (e.g. Hi-Fi-Buys Amphitheater, Turner Field, etc …).

3. Sticky Notes. Another type of advertisement I noticed involved a sticky note that advertised for a skateboard shop. The sticky note listed the prices of various products that could be purchased at that store.

4. Splatter Advertising. This is where I saw a sponsoring company’s logo all over everything. For example, one sponsor was on the roof of a hotel and inside a coffee shop. Take a look at the screen shots below … can you guess who the sponsor is? There were Target logos everywhere - and of course there was a billboard for Target. While users certainly aren’t missing this stuff, you have to wonder what the perception is. I tend to think this splattering is a little excessive.

5. Website Advertising. All over the Habbo Hotel homepage are Flash advertisements for Hot Rod - the new stuntman movie hitting theatres soon (in case you missed it on the in-world billboard earlier), and also for addictinggames.com, and the X-Games. I think that the X-Games advertisement was peculiar because in the last virtual world I explored (There.com) there were also X-Games ads … the X-Games must be really big in virtual worlds.

In my opinion Habbo Hotel has entirely too many advertisements. I decided to spare you the many many screenshots that I took of advertisements, but there were so many that it started to feel as as though walking around to look at advertisements was the plot of the game!

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.

Yet another virtual world has surfaced, this time from China. Like most virtual worlds HiPiHi’s main purpose is for users’ to interact and socialize. In Chinese HiPiHi means something similar to “a world created by you”. Many bloggers refer to HiPiHi as the Chinese Second Life or as a Second Life clone. But, what exactly are the similarities and differences between these two virtual spaces?

THE SIMILARITIES
HiPiHi has many similarities to Second Life. The avatar creation, avatar motions, and construction abilities are almost identical. HiPiHi residents can also buy, sell, trade, and manage their own piece of land. Both worlds are built around a socializing community, and both seem to focus on town centers, meetings, and malls as centers of attention and get-togethers. Although they seem so much alike, HiPiHi claims that they did not even know that Second Life was under construction at the same time that they were developing their world. Also similar to Second Life, the construction engine looks to work on the same physics engine and the building editor tools look exactly the same as in Second Life.

DIFFERENCES
The HiPiHi creators seem to pride themselves in the fact that HiPiHi may be similar to Second Life, but that they have worked hard to improve the graphics and user flexibility. In my professional opinion, HiPiHi is like Second Life; but with modified graphics, a different base language, and leans towards a female population. It should be noted that HiPiHi also claims that they are not focusing on a female group - even though 6 of the 10 characters are female and in all of their official promotional videos, there are few if any male avatars present. HiPiHi also prides itself in its helicopter control panel, which feels as if they had brought in a helicopter pilot to get ideas on how to make it more realistic. The HiPiHi creators also gloat that they include a parachute option so that avatars can jump out of flying vehicles in mid-flight. Many blogs that I have read say that the main difference between Second Life and HiPiHi is that they focus on different cultures and values.

Here are some links to blogs and websites that support these claims:

China’s Virtual World War

The Top 10 Things About HiPiHi

HiPiHi.com - What is HiPiHi?

The Chinese clone of Second Life: HiPiHi

Interview: HiPiHI, a 3D digital world from China

The Second Life competitors materialize?