THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

I’m up in Portland, Oregon, braving the light rain for the Platform International Animation Festival. I’ll be on a panel called "Get a Second Life" this Saturday at 2:30 Pacific, and Jason will join us via Second Life for the discussion.

Who’s here? Students, professional animators, producers, directors, musicians, graphic designers, architects, programmers, and marketers from all over the world. We’re all here to talk animation, hand-drawn, computer, stop-motion; to screen films; to talk about the business and the art of animation and its place in a changing media environment.

What’s interesting is that everyone I’ve talked to here gets virtual worlds. Many of them have only heard of Second Life and have only a passing idea of what it’s all about, but when I explain what Centric does, what the opportunities are, and where it’s going, they get it. Right away. Which is perfect, because virtual worlds need more of these artists and thinkers to get involved. One of the strengths of Second Life is user-generated content; one of its weaknesses is limited creation tools. The more animators there are in virtual worlds, the better the tools will get. Which is good for all of us.

If you’re in Portland, come check it out!

Okay, I shouldn’t be doing this. This is in no way or measure "professional." But I have to.

By now, you’ve probably seen the Forbes article saying "woe to Second Life, the party is over, American Apparel and Starwood are packing up because of ‘insignificant’ sales and few visitors, respectively."

And you may have heard the response from the virtual worlds community: "well, American Apparel didn’t really offer anything interesting and Aloft had no events to bring people back."

Well, I’m not going to comment on that. What I’m going to throw the flamethrower of truth on is Forbes’ implication that marketers don’t think it worth investing in new media platforms like Second Life–indeed, that they are so spendthrift that the ongoing $295 per month investment is something they have to slice from their marketing budget.

I have only one word for that: bullshit.

Add up all the money that American Apparel and Starwood spent on getting their Second Life builds done, plus the ongoing cost for a year of island ownership, and I guarantee you it’s not even a rounding error on their mainstream media budget.

I’ll repeat that: the total amount of money they spent on Second Life could be lost in a rounding error on their media budget. And the amount of money they spend per month to keep it running would buy one dinner for one client at the Beverly Wilshire’s mid-line restaurant.

So I don’t want to hear about Second Life being a waste of funds. When large corporations spend $20MM, $50MM, $100MM, $200MM or more on television, print, and outdoor advertising–media which are not directly measurable in terms of bottom-line results–then I don’t want to hear about some five- or six-figure project being a waste of marketing dollars.

And, if it’s already built, saying a low three-figure investment per month to keep it running is unsustainable is Beyond the Valley of Ridiculous.

Let’s face it. If marketers are pulling out of Second Life, it’s not to save money. They spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars every year on media which cannot be tied directly back to sales, media which are losing effectiveness with every passing year, media which reach a shrinking segment of the population–and they ask comparatively few questions about those tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

So why are they pulling out? Maybe they simply don’t believe in the platform. Maybe they don’t have the time to manage one more media channel. Maybe top management thinks it’s not the way to go. Maybe they don’t have the internal staff to commit to the ongoing Second Life presence they need. And all of these reasons are valid. There’s no reason that every company needs to rush headlong into virtual worlds.

Actually, rushing headlong into Second Life isn’t the right idea for any company.

Before stepping in, every organization should take a deep breath, sit back, and ask some tough questions: What are your goals? What results do you expect? What business model is right? Or is there a correct business model at all? Do you expect to make money on Second Life the same way you do on a PPC program? If so, there’s a big wake-up call needed–before any development starts. Do you expect to move the brand perception needle? If that’s the case, you need to understand the people you’re talking to, and the culture of the world–again, before making any investment in Second Life. 

But for companies with a sense of adventure, companies willing to look at this world as a world, companies who are comfortable with experimenting with new business models, and especially companies who understand that a well-known RL brand doesn’t necessarily translate to SL, we believe there are great opportunities.

Opportunities we’re only just beginning to explore. 

There’s an interesting article up on Reuters that brings home just how far along we’ve come in extending our online profiles to the wider world. The author discusses the pros and cons of the expanding phenomenon of social networking. Competing and complementary technologies are everywhere, allowing us to connect with each other in as many ways as we have time to maintain.

In the article, Jeff Jarvis says, "Revealing a little bit of yourself is the only way to make connections to other people and that is how the Internet works."

I agree, that revealing something about yourself gets people interested. They identify with you. You’re reaching out to other people like you, right?

What about the international reach of these revelations?

Consider this:

South Korea has over 80% broadband penetration, with millions playing online games and using services such as cyworld.

China has around a half-billion mobile phone users and is about to overtake the US as the largest broadband market. QQ is the largest social network in the world, with over 250 million users and 500 million accounts. And almost 30 million concurrency.

Japan’s largest social networking site, Mixi, sees its more than 10 million users spend an average of four and a half hours per visit. That’s not counting accessing the site from mobile phones, which is a very large part of Japanese time spent online.

The African continent, long ignored by the tech world, has more than 200 million mobile phone subscribers.

Second Life, HiPiHi, and other virtual worlds whose reach is and will certainly increasingly be global, are creating communities of people who’ve never met yet see each other in physical form everyday, and those communities reflect the changing world around us.

So who are you really talking to when you post a video on YouTube? Upload a new picture to Facebook? Promote a new song on MySpace? Update your Twitter feed?

Someone in Copenhagen might identify with the Bloc Party song playing on your page. Your blog post about sculpted prims in Second Life may be of interest to someone in Beijing. Maybe the only person who likes the pictures of your pet turtle on Flickr lives in Auckland.

You’re talking to the entire world. Get used to it.

Not only are we heading toward convergence of technologies, we’re smack dab in the middle of a convergence of cultures.

We interrupt this blog for a brief list of some of the conferences that we’ll be speaking at over the next few months:

Home Entertainment Summit
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Date: June 19, 2007 2:40PM
Speaker: Jason Stoddard
Topic: How Virtual Worlds Open New Universes of Entertainment

Platform Festival
Location: Portland, Oregon and Second Life
Date: June 30, 2007
Panelists: Ken Brady and Jason Stoddard
Topic: Get a Second Life

State of Play V
Location: Singapore
Date: August 19-22, 2007
Speaker: Ken Brady
Topic: Building Business in Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds Fall 2007
Location: San Francisco, CA
Date: October 10-11, 2007
Speakers: Ken Brady, Yuki Saeki
Topic: International Impact of Virtual Worlds

You know the drill. Drag yourself into their office, laptop bag on one shoulder and projector on another, ready to run the latest brag reel and neat little Powerpoint about how you’re gonna cut through the clutter, reach that audience, engage them–

Ah, crap.

I was standing in a large bullpen office area, but it wasn’t like any I’d ever seen before. This one was a collision of cocktail lounge and open-plan office, with lots of low and stylish couches in bright colors, punctuated by comfortable chairs clustered around small tables. If an agency waiting room and cafeteria had staged a hostile takeover of their production floor, this is what it might have looked like.

"Hey, how’d you get in here?" said a guy, flipping a set of ugly designer glasses up onto his forehead.

Additional details assembled: the room was almost empty. A few people sat on couches, working on handsets, or clustered at one of the tables. A group of three people were looking over a packaging design for something that looked like an electric shaver. Flashing messages crawled over the package, like an animated texture on a Second Life prim.

"What year am I in? 2017?"

"2012," said another guy, walking up to me and the first guy who’d noticed my appearance. He wore the same ugly designer glasses, flipped up on his head. I could see a flicker of images through their dark glass and realized, in that moment, what they were.

"Dataspecs?"

He nodded. "Apple iSee."

"Who’s this guy?" the first guy said.

Walk-up guy sighed and did a little toggling gesture by his glasses. The first guy flipped them down over his eyes and sat, open-mouthed.

"I’m–" I said.

"We know who you are," the walk-up guy said, tapping his dataspecs. "Science fiction writer, started a meta-agency, disappeared 5 years ago. Wrote a lot of stuff about how it will be in the future. Got some stuff right, some is really lol-tastic. By the way, I’m Bret. That’s Sanjay."

"You know this because . . . you’re running Google Ambient or something?"

A quick laugh. "Close. AmbientData. Out of China. Better analysis, cheaper."

"I, um, I am from the past." It sounded completely idiotic.

Bret crossed his arms. Sanjay flipped up his specs. "Neat. I scanned the records. He just appeared. None of the handheld cams, floaters, reconstructors, or ambients have him before he just appeared, poof. The first proof of temporal displacement!"

"Yeah, whatever," Bret said. "So, man from the past, what do you want?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

A flicker of irritation flashed across Bret’s face, then he pasted a smile over it. "Nobody comes out to do business in person, unless they’re trying to get a 10-million-RMB line of credit or something like that. What do you want, here, in our workspace?"

What did I want? I wondered. Would I flip back to 2007 like I did from 1997, or would I be stuck here forever?

"Uh, the lottery numbers?"

"Everyone says that," Sanjay said.

"How about a job?"

"Doing what?" Bret said.

"Strategy, uh, development, something in virtual worlds."

The two guys from the future glanced at each other. "What’s your specialty? Work environments? Brand gardens? Community co-creation? Global repnets? Tiering? Training? Advanced pedagogy? Immersive or non-immersive? Portable or not? Life-support-sustained, or casual use?"

I shook my head. I could guess what most of the applications were, but I didn’t know about others. "We weren’t so segmented when we were developing."

Bret grinned. "Yeah, the good old days of Second Life. And you were in HiPiHi, right?"

"Right."

"But that was before Amplifi, and NewCore, and . . . well, I mean, those are still players, but there are options. Depends on what you want to do. You’d need to spend some time retraining."

"I could do general strategy or creative."

Sanjay shook his head. "With zero rating on GlobalMarket, and no job record for the past 5 years? You’d have to start at GlobalMarket at the lowest crowdsourced tier, then work your way up into a trusted user sphere."

"Crowdsourced? You mean, like contests and things like that?"

Sanjay shook his head. "We’re not that cruel. GlobalMarket redistributes a percentage of all revenue based on participation and quality. Even if your work never gets chosen, you’ll make some money."

"It’s not much of a life," Bret said. "You can’t even afford a WeRU mechanical turk tier. But if you’re good, you move up to more trusted tiers or closed agency nets."

"So, you can’t just hire me? You’re a small company."

Bret laughed. "Are you kidding, we have over 10,000 people in our network, 1500 of which are full staff."

I looked around the small room. "So this is a satellite office? Your HQ is in China?"

"This is as big as any of our offices," Bret said. "Once in a while, people have to get together in flesh. Most of the time they work through the WorkCentric virtual world. Same thing, less fighting with your cubemates."

"I predicted that."

"Yeah, but your ideas on monetized content were pretty funny," Sanjay said.

"Hey, what did you predict lately?"

Sanjay chuckled and turned away. "Things are moving too fast for that. Too many directions. Even the ambientspace doesn’t give us a solid direction."

"Ambientspace?"

Sanjay took off his glasses and went to hand them to me, then paused and looked up at Bret. Bret nodded, and he held them out to me. I took them and slipped them on. A three-dimensional space full of colored threads twisted and snaked and tangled out to infinity.

"New trend visualization thing that some kids whipped up out of old libSL code, videoscrapers, and trend-engines. If you know the color code and follow along, sometimes you can pull some long-term trends out of it."

"Long-term?"

"6 months or so," Bret said. "Maybe. It’s only been around for 16 weeks or so."

"But it’s getting a lot of refinement," Sanjay said. "Many monkeys on the code."

I tried to follow the gleaming threads, their cryptic tags. It was meaningless. I took off the glasses, handed them to Sanjay, and stood up.

"Where are you going?" Bret said.

"Back," I said. I hoped.

I went to the door and pushed it open. And then I was standing just at the front of the Eclectic Cafe, waiting to be seated. The familiar Treo Default Ring echoed in the lobby, and seventy percent of the people there grabbed for their purse or pocket.

I sighed and smiled. Sue was waiting at a table. "Look at this, I can do Google street view," she said, showing me her new iPhone. "Isn’t the future wonderful?"

"Yeah," I said, and picked up the menu.

Centric’s new office overlooks a broad, coral pink plaza.  It’s ringed with bronze busts of television pioneers and has a fountain with a giant Emmy Award in the middle.  It’s not an inviting spot, which is a shame because it’s right in the middle of an office park in a part of town that needs as many inviting spots as it can get.

I used to think it was the color, but now I’m convinced it’s the fact that the plaza is just too big.  I’m not agoraphobic, but the only time I walked across the thing, I felt like I was exposed to the entire world.  All I wanted to do was hustle to the other side as quickly as possible.  Since then, I skirt around the plaza’s edges.  I’ve noticed that other people do, too.

Is it lizard brain instinct?  Is it some buried genetic fear that something will swoop down out of the sky and eat me?  Or was I just freaked out by the grinning bust of Bob Hope?

I thought about the plaza as I walked around someone’s Second Life orientation island the other day.  Despite its trees and benches, the place felt too big, too open.  It feels odd to complain about space when most of SL is jam-packed with clutter, but I think it’s important to maintain a balance between Stuff and Not Stuff.  Music comes from the spaces between notes, but you need the notes to make the space (unless, of course, you’re John Cage).  Same goes for a build, especially when that build winds up empty most of the time.  Just because you have all the space in the world doesn’t mean you have to create giant, imposing structures.  Scale is different in a virtual world, and I think it’s going to take some time before architects get a handle on the best ways to build.

So, what to do?  Ask yourself when you walk around SL: do I feel uncomfortable?  Do I feel relaxed?  What is it about this place that elicits these reactions?  How do experienced users feel?  Newbies to SL?  People who’ve never been in a virtual world?  It will take time to sort everything out, but the good news is that you can remove everything with a few mouseclicks and start again.  I hope there will be even more experimentation with sculptured prims in structures, bringing about buildings that would be impossible in reality but work beautifully in virtu.

In the meantime, I’ll still walk on the edges of the plaza, keeping a watchful eye on Bob Hope.

You know the drill. Drag yourself into their office, laptop bag on one shoulder and projector on another, ready to run the latest brag reel and neat little Powerpoint about how you’re gonna cut through the clutter, reach that audience, engage them, create a community. All the latest interactive marketing buzzwords, carefully woven into a seamless whole. Or that’s the idea.

Except this time was different. I was standing in front of a big honey-oak desk, and there was a guy glaring up at me. A little plaque on his desk poked through a catastrophe of papers, ring-binders and books. It read: Geoffery Palmer, Director of Marketing.

"Who are you?" he asked.

I opened my mouth to say something. That was when I realized I had no idea how I’d gotten there. It seemed like your normal meet-and-greet meeting, but there was no comforting weight of projector or laptop bag on my shoulder. I reached into my overshirt pocket to get a card, but it was empty.

"I, uh . . ." Was it possible I’d blanked out? Just, like, lost it? There’d been a lot of late nights lately. Play it off, I told myself. You’ve gone in cold before. You don’t need the presentations.

"Good to meet you, Geoff," I said, sticking out my hand. "I’m from Centric, Agency of Change."

Geoff’s eyes rolled briefly heavenward. "Oh. Yeah. Another one of you guys. Sorry, I must’ve missed it," he said, pawing through the debris on his desk, apparently trying to uncover a heavily scribbled desktop calendar.

That was when I started noticing more details. The stuff on his desk were a bunch of CMYK overlay proofs. A pristine copy of The Dilbert Principle peeked through the mess. Geoff himself wore a shirt and a tie, and a blazer hung carelessly on a chair parked behind him. A chair that sat in front of a beige Compaq computer displaying the ancient Windows starfield screen-saver. An antique Motorola flip-phone, the grey plastic kind that looked like they’d been made out of melted-down ball-point pens, sat next to it. One of the big ring-binders was Dymo-tape labeled, Concurrence Networks Marketing Plan 1997.

And the desk calendar? The top of it read, June 1997.

This ain’t happening. I shook my head. But . . . when was the last time you’ve seen a marketing guy wear a suit around the office?

"I’m in 1997," I said.

Geoff looked up at me and frowned. "Yeah, and?"

"When I woke up this morning, it was 2007."

"That’s great. Why don’t you give me the lottery numbers, then?"

I reached in my pockets, looking for a dollar bill, a credit card, a drivers’ license, anything to show him. Nothing. "I. No. Really. I’m from 2007."

Geoff sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. "Neat pitch."

"What?"

"Never had an agency come at me like this."

"This ain’t a pitch."

Geoff’s eyes narrowed. "So, you’re all running around in flying cars? Something like that?"

"No, still waiting for those."

Geoff stood up and looked me up and down. "You aren’t wearing any futuristic clothes or anything like that."

"Man, it’s only been 10 years," I said, sitting down.

"You said you were from an agency."

"Yeah."

"Media or creative?"

"Uh, well, interactive. But leading-edge stuff, social media, virtual worlds, things like that."

Geoff sat back down and laughed. "Interactive agency, oh that’s rich. So, you’re another web developer. We just had our first site redone, we won’t need anyone for a while."

My mind was going a mile a second. They didn’t know what was coming. They had no idea. Google didn’t even exist yet. Was Overture around? I’d forgotten. Had eBay even gone public yet? The things I could do with what I knew–but first, I’d have to get a job.

"We can still help you out," I said. "I mean, with my knowledge, we can put your site way ahead of anything else out there."

Geoff waved a hand. "Our website? Who cares? That’s IT anyway, not marketing."

"Not marketing? Are you guys crazy? What do you think your site is for?"

"As far as I’m concerned, it’s a necessary evil. It’s not like most of our potential customers even have web access yet. Yeah, it might grow in the future, but I’m not going to bet on that."

"But it will!" I said. "In fact, one video-sharing site, YouTube, has the reach and engagement of a major television network. In, uh, 2007."

"Video? Online?" Geoff laughed. "Dancing postage stamps. No studio’d spend money on that."

"But it’s not the studios. It’s the users. User-generated content, they call it."

"What? People just go out and do movies, shows, sitcoms, things like that?" Geoff looked skeptical.

"A lot of it is shorter content, but yes, people have done that."

Geoff crossed his arms and looked at his antique phone, which didn’t even have a LCD display. He was clearly thinking about throwing me out. I needed to think of something simpler, something he could understand.

"Wait," I said. "We could start up SEO. Search engine optimization, get you listed on top of Google . . . ah, I mean, what? Lycos, Inktomi? How about Overture? Pay per click ads."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or why I’d even want that."

"Flash banners . . . uh, I mean, banner ads, and an email program."

"I hear ads are going to destroy the internet. And, who would we send the email to?"

"All your prospects."

"Like they have email addresses. They’re still rolling out personal email here." Geoff’s hand tapped on top of his phone. "Look, that was a neat pitch, but it’d just be better if you told me what you were selling. The internet is interesting, but it’s really only for a small, tech-savvy audience. We can’t afford to spend any time on it."

"I . . ." I didn’t know what to say. How could I explain to him that this was only the start? How could I tell him to forget this job and help me start one of the first SEO or PPC firms, or one of the first email marketing firms, or just wait a little bit and start up social networking, be the MySpace before MySpace, or the YouTube before YouTube, or maybe even the first Second Life? Would he even believe me if I told him I looked up traffic on my Treo before checking my email, that we had offices in China, or that we helped companies build presences and marketing programs in worlds that didn’t even exist?

No, it wouldn’t happen. He’d probably just cross his arms and say–

"Look," Geoff said. "I know there isn’t anyone making money on the internet, for all the hype and fluff. Come back when we need to update the site in a couple of years, or come back when you have some case studies about how you helped people move real product."

I looked at him one more time, at this man who still lived in a world of Casual Fridays and checking your AOL email once a week and cellphones that bragged of 2 hours of talk time and 200MHz Pentium IIs and overlay proofs and sighed. There was no way I’d be able to make him understand his entire way of doing business, his entire way of living, would change over the next 10 years.

Geoff seemed to see it. "But it was a good pitch. They should have you in creative, not sales."

What could I say? I thanked him, shook his hand, and walked out of his office . . .

. . . and right back into the current world of 2007. Projector bag, laptop bag, Treo. And Julie beside me saying, "You know, we may want to tone down the virtual world stuff, these guys don’t really believe in it, they think it’s a geeky tech audience and a fad, they want to see the 100 million impressions, not the 100 tastemakers."

She couldn’t understand why I had to stop outside the thick glass walls of the building and laugh, uproariously, for a good three minutes.