Machinima commercials for virtual products
by Vladimir Cole 
{ May 29th 2006 at 11:00PM }
As most everybody knows by now, you can sell (virtual) stuff in the (virtual) world of Second Life. It should therefore come as no surprise that sellers are using advertising to hawk their wares.
One Second Life denizen (Nylon Pinkney, who blogs here) created three ad spots to stimulate demand for the Nylon 35mm, the Nyloid Super Color 1000, and the Nylonic VHS Camcorder.
There's real money to be made selling virtual goods for virtual dollars. How long before the first virtual ad agency is founded for the purpose of creating sexy spots for virtual goods? Better yet, how long before established advertising agencies hire real sluts starlets to appear in said spots? Right now, all of the advertising we've seen is first-party and generally incomparable to advertising seen on prime-time television. That will eventually change, but when?
[Via The Daily Graze]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Babylonian @ May 29th 2006 11:17PM
Impressive.
The fact that SL is (primarily) free is contributing to so many creative people joining who might otherwise hesitate to get into an MMO.
Clyde Smith @ May 29th 2006 11:37PM
Federated Media already has an ad agency in Second World:
http://chasnote.blogspot.com/2006/04/selling-ads-in-parallel-universe.html
And they're taking Linden Dollars:
http://chasnote.blogspot.com/2006/03/fm-now-accepts-payment-in-linden.html
Danny @ May 29th 2006 11:39PM
Thats great but I hope real world advertisers don't see it as being ok to put ads in other games that don't need it.
Jaded @ May 29th 2006 11:56PM
Second Life is pretty much exactly the kind of online space that you always read about in sci-fi novels. It's too bad that the graphics are rather simple and it chugs at a low framerate on most systems. But those things can (and if there is enough money invested, will) be fixed.
Don Jose @ May 30th 2006 3:19AM
Is that Kudo Tsunoda in the pic? When did he grow a beard? lol
FSK405K @ May 30th 2006 9:59AM
Great, just what we needed....more advertising.
KirbyMeister @ May 30th 2006 2:33PM
I'm going to dissent here: SECOND LIFE SUCKS. Seriously, first we complain about real money trade and then we talk about an MMO which is based mostly on real money trade of user-created content. Hypocricy much? The only reason why Second Life is so popular is because of the novelty value; it's designed a lot like various cyberpunk novel depictions of the Internet or it's successors. LAAAAME! I'll take HTML and command lines over Second Life fanboys any day of the week.
Danno @ May 30th 2006 9:32PM
I'm not terribly fond of playing in Second Life. The stuff that people build in there is impressive by all means, but there's so little to do ASIDE from build and talk to random people that you find that it's just not that interesting.
I think it points to an interesting direction that online communities *could* go, but I don't think it's the end point and I certainly don't think the capabilities provided by the SL engine are sufficient as they are. They're focusing too much on massive persistance when rich interactivity is what's really needed.