Stardoll, the virtual world and virtual doll site aimed at girls aged 9 to 17, did some serious self-examination earlier this year, which Nic Mitham from K Zero has picked over. The world has some great numbers from its users: Out of 868 surveyed younger members, 80% visit daily. What's surprising, though, is that girls' mothers are almost as engaged: out of 158 mothers, 54% visit daily, 75% visit with their daughters once per week, 64% visit by themselves, and 60% have their own accounts. As Mitham points out, that's not a bad secondary market to be looking at.
That's something worth keeping in mind as it seems like marketing in virtual worlds is hitting another wave of excitement. While marketing and advertising was touted as major application and innovation for Second Life in the last few years, a backlash that peaked this summer severely squashed that.
The problems (ably summed up in a recent Reuters article) with marketing in Second Life include technical difficulties, lack of mainstream penetration, a user base that's more interested in "local" creations than outsider brands, and some tough computing requirements. Of course, there are still plenty of people excited about projects in Second Life. (For example, see Electric Sheep Company COO Giff Constable's take as well as Mitham's own recent success promoting L'Oreal in Second Life.) That said, there just aren't many other virtual worlds aimed at the same adult demographic, though more are definitely coming and sooner rather than later.
Those problems, however, have largely been solved (or avoided) by youth-oriented worlds like Stardoll, Habbo Hotel, and Gaia Online (just to name a few prominent cases). And the rest of the world is taking notice. In Habbo's particular case, the rest of the world includes Paramount Pictures and the William Morris Agency. There's no shortage of youth worlds to choose from either, which agencies like The Electric Sheep, Millions of Us, and Metaversatility have taken notice of with numerous campaigns aimed at brand extension to the tween and teen market.
Maybe it's time to look at There.com for the moms as well.
Pretty much every youth-oriented virtual world has older outliers way outside its target demographic. That's something the upcoming LEGO Universe has acknowledged explicitly, and, by the way, it looks more and more exciting to me personally pretty much every day. Other worlds, like Mattel's BarbieGirls.com, are going even further to embrace the olds.
“We really want to give parents a place on BarbieGirls that is designed for them and speaks to them,” Rosie O’Neill, Senior Brand Manager, Barbie Tech, told me at Virtual Worlds 2008. “What you’re going to see us launching in a few weeks is a new section called Parents’ Place. Our campaign around it is all about E3: Educate, Empower, and Engage.”
Mattel's goal is to help parents feel comfortable about their children's online habits, but since one of those E's stands for "Engage," it's not a whole lot further to start talking about measuring engagement.
For an analogy, it's been a while since I woke up in time to watch Saturday morning cartoons, but I remember a fair amount of commercials aimed at parents watching along with their kids. At least, I'm assuming Downy wasn't trying to convince me to go out and purchase our household's fabric softener.
So, to bounce the idea back to K Zero (or anyone else marketing in virtual worlds), is it time to start looking at kids worlds as a way to reach out to parents?
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