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30 Apr

Stardoll – Fame, fashion and friends………and Mothers?

KZero Clients, Virtual Research

In Feb of this year Stardoll (a KZero client) carried out some in-depth research into their membership base, with some interesting findings.

The targeted age range that Stardoll positions into is the seven – 17 segment so you’d assume (naturally) that this young female audience is the primary market. It is, but what the research discovered was the high levels of engagement from the mothers (or guardian) of the girls – marketers pay attention.

The graph displayed right shows the findings from the question ‘How often do you visit and play Stardoll?’. From a base of 868 younger Members, a massive 80% visit Stardoll daily. Looking over to the Mothers (n=158), over half (54%) are also frequent visitors logging into Stardoll daily.

So, from a marketers perspective looking at potential activity, this gives a new angle – there’s an incumbent secondary market (the Mothers).

This element of the research also shows the 75% of Mothers visit Stardoll several times a week with their children.

Continue reading →

30 Apr

Woogi World claims 100% safety for kids

Kids/Tween Worlds

Education and internetsafety-based kids virtual world Woogi World is storming out of the bunker with a new press release and statement. The company has been working with online verification company eGuardian to create ‘The only kids virtual world that is not only 100% safe but is also benefiting society by helping our children be better kids.” Taking these elements in turn, Ron Zayas CEO of eGuardian comments:

“We are proud to work with premier partners like Woogi World?¢‚Äû¬¢, and supply them with the information they need to create an online community that expands what is possible for kids, while providing parents with peace of mind. Through the efforts of eGuardian and our partners, Web, email and instant messaging can be made safe, predator-free and appropriate for children of every age.”

Safety is obviously of paramount importance for virtual worlds, an area focused on heavily by new virtual world Vizwoz, with their Vizcops – adedicated in-game police force. Woogi World is clearly upping the ante here with their 100% claim. Let’s hope it’s achievable.

Continue reading →

27 Apr

The Five Rules of Virtual Brand Management

Strategic Marketing

Along with the Seven Point Plan for Marketing in Virtual Worlds (more here), KZero also has a dedicated strategic framework for brand management in virtual worlds.

As the number of virtual worlds allowing content creation increases, this concept becomes more and more important for real world brand owners. The full case study can be ordered here and shown below is an overview presentation.

KZero services:

Strategy

Business Planning

Marketing/Media

Product Development

26 Apr

Taking brands into virtual worlds. vBusiness Expo presentation

Strategic Marketing, Virtual World strategy

Shown below is the K Zero presentation delivered on day one of the vBusiness Expo. ‘Taking brands into virtual worlds’ uses the Seven Point Plan as a strategic framework to outline the marketing steps required by brands and companies considering metaverse activity. This case study can be ordered here.

25 Apr

‘The folks down at Disney, they have plans for your children’

Videos / Machinima

Fast Company contributor and co-author of the Naked Conversations blog, Shel Israelhas posted a video interview he conducted with senior personnel from Disney, including Mike Goslin, VP Virtual Reality Studio. Mike uses a ‘themepark’ analogy to explain the Disney strategy of having different worlds for different age ranges and interest groups.

Here’s the full article over on the Global Neighbourhoods blog.

K Zero services

For brands

For virtual world owners

For investors and VC’s

25 Apr

Puma and Reebok sign-up for Football Superstars

Luxury Brands, Teenage+ Worlds

September is the latest date for the public launch of Football Superstars, the soccer-themed vertical world coming from the UK.

The benefits for clothing/fashion, sports and luxury brands are pretty obvious for FS and the first two major companies taking part in Football Superstars via IGA, hot off the press, are Puma and Reebok.

Puma will be dipping their toes into the realms of avatar customisation and virtual retail with the launch of the ‘V-Boot’ – a virtual football boot on sale to residents in-world.

Reebok is integrating their ‘Play By Your Own Rules’ campaign, starting with a registration portalto encourage and drive new sign-ups.

K Zero is an accredited agency partner of Football Superstars. Contact  KZero to discuss potential branding and marketing opportunities. Interested in signing-up for FS? Here’s the registration page.

25 Apr

Latest Football Superstars imagery

Teenage+ Worlds

Sports metamogg Football Superstars reached ‘feature-complete’ status a few weeks ago and is currently in closed-beta stage. In the meantime footy-fans, here’s some new and exclusive assets of one of the stadiums as well as some internal areas in-world.

Continue reading →

25 Apr

User generated content? Lego’s been in the game for years

Kids/Tween Worlds

Noise is slowly starting to come from Lego about their planned virtual world Lego Universe, led by Mark Hansen, director of Business Development. Now, it’s not difficult to imagine the basis for Lego Universe not to mention the likely popularity, after all, everyone knows Lego and understands what their proposition is – user generated content (see a video of Lego Universe here)

Often cited as the holy-grail for engaging virtual environments, UGC is something that Lego has facilitated from day one. The Experience Economy blog has an insightful article giving an overview of a presentation given by Hansen. In his talk, the three main audiences for Lego were laid out:

  1. The young kids
  2. The mature community of almost exclusively male enthusiasts
  3. Parents/mothers as gift givers

What a valuable fusion of demographics and strategically, an upper-hand for Lego in the battle for virtual world sign-ups. Having these individual markets already addressable by Lego could cause their competitions in this space to be ‘bricking it’, so to speak.

Michel Bauwens goes on to explain in the article how Lego unvisages the universe to operate:

‘It will offer a combination of already prepared worlds, but also allow for new universes to be created by users; and there will be ultimately a full integration with production capabilities which could be user-initiated. In other words,it will be possible to physically produce successful virtual user-led creations.’

What’s of most interesting in the article is now Lego categorises it’s development phases from a user involvement perspective (valuable insight for any virtual world operator with UGC plans). The slide to the right shows these evolutions.

Image courtesy of Experience Economy Blog.

25 Apr

Pimp my Peugeot

Uncategorized

Back in Sep 07 Peugeot followed the auto-pack and set-up an island in SL. The venue followed the usual checklist for car brands in SL – read more about the island here.

Refreshingly, Peugeot is now running a competition on their island to encourage residents to customise one of their vehicles. Whilst again this is not a new concept (Pontiac and Toyota have run similar successful custom-build projects) nevertheless it’s a good sign that the company is keen to harvest some NPD output from SL.

Throughout May, visitors to the island can participate in the ‘Peugeot Virtual Challenge’. What this means is people can change the exterior styling (basically the colours) and submit them to the competition. Cash is king, and there’s three L$ rewards up for grabs, including L$70,000 for the winner.

Here’s the supporting microsite mon amies.

Cars and Second Life. A popular little segment. Here’s some imagery of official brands and unofficial versions.

24 Apr

Campaign results for L’Oreal Paris phase one

Luxury Brands, Metabrands

Several weeks ago we finished phase one of the L’Oreal Paris campaign in SL. Today as part of my presentation at the vBusiness Expo I gave a background to this campaign as well as released the campaign data. The relevant metrics and data are in this post. A background to the strategy of this campaign is here.

In terms of overall takeaways (we gave the make-up looks/skins away for free, so the term ‘sale’ doesn’t apply) during the three months of the campaign over 34,000 were taken by residents.

Again, to explain the terminology, we’re using takeaways as opposed to giveaways because all transactions were initiated by residents – the L’Oreal Paris products were stocked in the stores of existing SL retailers and we relied on the visitors to these stores and locations to activate their own call to action – clicking on a display board and receiving the product package.

This is different to say items being distributed by teams of people in SL. The graph to the left shows cumulative transactions on a weekly basis for the campaign.

As data was able to be collected in real-time, during the first month we tracked transactions daily. After month one we switched to a weekly assessment. The graph shown right has these weekly figures.

On average, 2428 products were taken each week. It’s of use to point out here that we started with just two of the four skins and in week four were up and running in all venues with all products.

This coincided with the launch into the Greenies Kitchen and therefore the best performing week (four) from the campaign with over 7,000 transactions across our venues. Naturally transactions slowed around the Christmas break but ramped up again in week 10, when our Second Style advertising was activated. Continue reading →

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