Interview: Millions of Us Announces Industry Coalition for Study on ROI in Virtual Worlds

Millions of Us, in partnership with Sulake, Gaia Interactive, Metaplace, SceneCaster, Doppelganger, Vivaty, and WeeWorld, with more expected to join, has announced an industry-wide coalition to commission a study from Forrester Consulting to study engagement metrics, and ROI in virtual worlds. "The basic idea is that we’ve organized a consortium of the major virtual world platforms, about 10 of them so far, who are all participating in a study by Forrester,"  Millions of Us CEO Reuben Steiger told Virtual Worlds News. "We’ve come out of the experimental phase of marketing in virtual worlds. Consequently, what we’re seeing as an agency for large brands is that they’re now committing non-experimental budgets. When they understand that this is a standalone category with 100 million people globally, they have a lot of trouble making sense of what to make sense."

"ROI isn’t defined clearly," Steiger continued. "There are no standards that you see in traditional interactive such as click-throughs, banners, standard sizes. All these benchmarks and metrics from the era of the Internet are really the result of just what we’re doing here: the leading publishers getting together and saying, ‘We’re all going to start to talk about this so that media buyers and advertisers can compare us apples to apples and understand what the difference is to measure success and what environments make the most sense demographically to reach a particular audience.'"

Part of the problem for Steiger is that current research comes out six-months too late and focuses on the wrong subjects, asking brand managers whether they're one-week campaign was a success or a failure instead of talking to members of the industry with more experience. While Steiger says he wouldn't want Millions of Us to influence the study, he has hopes for the results.

"Our hope is that they’re going to talk to people with deep knowledge. Let’s say a Christian Renaud versus whomever else, or Scion would be a good content after advertising in 5 or 6 different worlds," he said. "Our hope is that the output will be such that advertisers can understand what realistic expectations are and what they should be suing this for--Is it for brand building, lead generation, transactional purchases?—so they can more intelligently choose between platforms."

More importantly, he hopes it will bolster the trend of companies wanting to strategize and then launch initiatives instead of launching campaigns and virtual worlds and only evaluating strategy in hindsight.

"It’s an important effort for people who would otherwise be competitors to get together and work in everyone’s common interest to advance the industry to a state of maturity," said Steiger.

There are certainly major platforms unmentioned in the press release, but Steiger says he would love more participation. A lot of this coalition has come together recently, and while no one has said yet said no, there are still plenty of others to approach.

"We began putting the initiative simply from the perspective of definining our goals, the questions we would want to ask, and how the whole thing would work only about 8 weeks ago. We talked to clients about what their expectations have been and what their frustrations have been in trying to find the right platform. We won't turn anyone away; we would like everyone  to participate."

The information will be published publicly for anyone's use in the hopes that it will lead to more questions and more research.

"The environments are all different, but some basic rules are all the same," said Steiger. "When you look at what goes on in virtual worlds, it kills all other media when it comes to engagement and colelctively we face a challenge in terms of delivering scale in as predictable a way as you can currently do through DoubleClick. My hope is that this will lead to a deeper understanding of the science of engagement and will move towards being able to quantify the value of engagement."

Research will begin next week and is set to be available in June.

Comments

[Jared Freedman]

It turns out that the Web Analytics Association has been working on Social Media Standards (which includes Virtual Worlds) for over a year. I'm the Co-chair of the sub-committee for Standards and we are already working in an OPEN format wiki where anyone can contribute, not just invited participants.

http://waasocialmediawiki.com

In order to have voting power, you need to be a WAA member, but this is open to anyone.