GigaOm has a great piece about the relative failure of real-world marketing inside the Second Life metaverse. There’s been a sort of fascination with promoting real-world stuff among 2.0 nerds, myself included. But the consensus seems to be that the advertising messages being sent through 2L just aren’t sticking:

Due to server architecture, however, these islands are only accessible by teleportation, making it the ultimate opt-in experience. Giving marketers the unique challenge of getting Residents to voluntary dive into their ad, and stay long enough for any kind of meaningful brand immersion. So it’s not all that surprising marketers are largely floundering in Second Life: it’s like trying to create ads in a 3D Tivo.

To which I would add, if you’re not creating something compellingly complimentary to the 2L experience, you’re failing. This is where the first VoIP-to-PSTN experiment within 2L failed, I believe. Why bother calling somebody within 2L when you can just reach for your phone or click your Gizmo Project window? These gimmicky branding ideas are all too hard and they don’t compliment the metaverse itself. When teleportation is king, advertiser stickiness matters. It reminds me of all the early attempts at industry info-aggregation like buzzsaw.com and its ilk–very shiny Web 1.0 interfaces that allowed people to accomplish things in a manner they’d actually prefer not to employ. The net result of 1.0 was the dot com bust, as we all remember well.

Any noticeable clump of green dots attracts more dots, and as those grow, more follow– a feedback loop colloquially known as “the green dot effect”. Second Life’s most successful entrepreneurs (who’ve proven far more agile and inventive then most of their real world counterparts) sustain this flurry of dots by holding constant events, giveaways, and games. [...] Amazingly, corporate marketers have been slow to replicate these homegrown strategies.

This is the magic of 2.0. This why pay-me-for-impressions advertising doesn’t work in a place like 2L. Quality control occurs automatically in a 2.0. People will flock to quality on the basis of popularity. Democratized hype. Simply slapping an island onto the 2L map doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t got that green dot swing. And how do you get that swing? By making something that advances the 2L user experience. People don’t come to 2L for real world. They come to 2L for 2L.

What this all boils down to, in my honest but informed opinion, is simple, really. 2L is still a niche on the fringe of one edge of the mainstream. The user community is too small for mass marketing or mass merchandising. 2L’s (perhaps accidental) attempt to reinvent the web needs time to mature. Not every task on the web needs to happen in 3D, so there’s a natural backlash against historically 2D activities in Second Life. Advertisers need to understand this and take advantage of what 2L offers, rather than squeezing the old 1.0 notion of branding into the 3D, democratized metaverse. A counterpoint to 2L’s failures as an advertising mechanism is MySpace, which has blended traditional quantity-over-quality advertising with the 2.0 notion of social networks (something of which 2L has only scratched the surface).