Promoting a brand in the virtual world isn’t a cakewalk. That’s because not every citizen of the virtual world wants to be subjected to advertising.
Brand Asia
HONG KONG: Over three million Japanese young adults who hang out at Mobagetown (or Mobile Game Town), a social network site for mobile phone users, have more than a passing acquaintance with Fanta. Fanta is, on the face of it, the digital avatar of a cheery 14-year-old girl: she sports a strawberry-shaped hat, and greets her online peers with a hearty "Konichiwa!" (Hello). But beneath that sociable mask, Fanta’s true identity is revealing: and what it shows up is that slick marketers have come up with one more creative way to tap into young minds with targeted advertising and a trendy new medium.
Fanta is what you might call a ‘profile ad’, or an ad that’s meant to engage members of social networking spaces (such as MySpace and Second Life). In particular, Fanta is
a virtual persona who is operated and managed by an ad agency hired by Coca-Cola. Profile ads on social network service sites are not entirely new - they’ve been around in the US for a while - but in East Asia, they’re only now beginning to enhance their profile.
On this SNS site, for instance, Fanta acknowledges that she wants to ‘promote’ Coca-Cola’s latest addition to the Fanta stable, a new strawberry-flavoured drink. Elsewhere, on Second Life, for instance, there are other symbols of ‘avatar commerce’ at work: Coke, Corona and Budweiser beers, Evian water, iPod are a few of the brands that are being peddled in that virtual world where, it’s been established, residents spend the equivalent of $5 million a month! And Yahoo users can dress up their avatars in swish branded clothing from Adidas and FCUK!
Writing on ‘Avatar-based Marketing’, Harvard Business Review senior editor Paul Hemp notes that the "combination of robust virtual-world commerce and the growing overlap of virtual worlds and the real world suggests opportunities for creative real-world marketers."
Even so, promoting a brand in the virtual world isn’t a cakewalk for advertisers. That’s because not every citizen of the virtual world wants to be subjected to advertising in that cocoon he’s built himself. Notes Betsy Book, who launched Virtual Worlds Review, a web-based guide to social virtual worlds: "For some members, the virtual world is a pleasant refuge from the barrage of advertising they are subjected to daily in the real world."
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