"Chairman and CEO Christie Hefner said that later this year, the company plans to create new virtual worlds as part of its online mix as well," reports PaidContent. I've been listening to the webcast of Playboy's Q1 2008 earnings call all morning, though, and I haven't heard a specific mention of creating virtual worlds [UPDATE: a more direct mention is below], so that discussion may have come last week. In yesterday's call Chairman and CEO Christie Hefner did mention that online work was going to be one of the major drivers for the coming year in ways that do sound pretty consistent with work in virtual worlds.
"What I think is a little different is that we believe that the potential of online is much greater than the performance we've seen in the last several years," said Hefner. "And to realize that potential we have to catch up in terms of technological infrastructure and breadth of content and interconnectedness between what we do in the virtual world and what we're doing in other businesses in terms of e-commerce, in terms of events, in terms of advertising, in terms of social networking, etc."
Playboy has been one of the more successful major brands to work in Second Life already. After opening an attraction-based location last June, Playboy's island higher foot traffic than many other real-world brands. That more isolated approach hasn't been as successful in general, though, so Playboy later integrated more heavily with the local community, inviting homegrown designers to create Playboy-branded goods and sell them on Playboy's island to draw even more traffic.
It sounds, though, like Playboy may be striking out on its own. While it won't have the advantage of drawing on an existing community, I'm sure Playboy can find some way to attract users to a proprietary virtual world.
UPDATE: "The Playboy brand is what creates the unique connection we have with consumers and gives us a vital competitive edge," said Hefner. "Most importantly, we believe it is the strength and appeal of the brand that will drive the company's future success, and we intend to leverage that both in immersive real-world environments and in the virtual environment to increase shareholder value."
That's not a clear indication of where the company is going specifically, but it definitely sounds like more virtual worlds activity is in the future.
Sorry I missed that earlier.
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