Makena Technologies, creator of There.com, announced today that Scion would be expanding its campaign in the virtual world for a third phase. Makena partnered with Trilogy Studios and Metaversatility to introduce three concept cars, the FUSE, t2B and Hako Coupe, for users to drive and customize, enhancing its Club Scion dance environment, and adding more Scion-branded clothing for users. The two companies are sharing some use stats from the first parts of the campaign as well that helped drive the latest expansion: since the launch in August 2007, 20,000 users spent nearly 3,000 hours inside Club Scion, averaging out at about nine minutes. Interactive Scion kiosks, available in the club and elsewhere, were used 93,000 times and 21,000 Scion-branded virtual items have been sold.
"Clearly the big stand-out for me is time spent. 20,000 members spending 3,000 hours in the Scion night club, that to me is a lot," Ben Richardson, VP of Business Development for Makena Technologies/There.com, told Virtual Worlds News. "That's just over nine minutes per visitor on average. That to me is engagement. And I think that echoes what virtual worlds do better than any other medium--they deliver the concept of time spent. That is engagement, and that's important to any marketer. Whether it's a change in brand perception, education, anything, it begins with the amount of time you have to interact with the user."
Sharing that sort of data is almost as important as the growth of engagement itself. Richardson points out that as marketers learn the advantage of branding in virtual worlds and the time available to the them, they'll get smarter and smarter about using those nine minutes.
"When you add virtual worlds to the ad mix, we have the broad reach," said Richardson. "There's the banner buy and keywords, which casts a broad breadth, but you don't get depth. The average interaction time for any online marketing material, whether it's a survey or video or any of the probably 2 dozen kinds, on average the amount of time consumers spent interaction, assuming they clicked on them, is in the 14-16 second range. When you compare that to nine minutes, you're talking about 4000x times spent. It's orders of magnitude. That's what we're hoping to convey to other marketers."
Of course, one of the common complaints about marketing in virtual worlds--one that was highlighted in the backlash against Second Life--is that audience sizes are still small. Nine minutes of engagement is certainly impressive, but how does that stack up when it's reaching 20,000 people.
Richardson says reach in virtual worlds comes from the activity of the community, and There.com promotes its partners and attempts to build those communities. Reach is important, he says, but more marketers are also looking to engagement.
"It depends on the client's overall level of understanding of virtual worlds, and we definitely find a mix," he explained. "Those marketers who don't understand virtual worlds sort of default to 'how many impressions can I generate?' In some cases, they're still thinking of CPMs and those kinds of metrics that don't have relevance to virtual worlds. When they come in with that level of understanding, there's a whole lot more education to shifting that to time spent and the quality of time around your brand. Other brands like Scion who come in and say we really want to go deep with those that respond to our brand, There.com lets you go deep for a compelling brand."
Likewise, brands like Scion are also realizing that a virtual world campaign doesn't always stand on its own. The buy for a virtual world should be seen as part of a larger mix. It has its place, and so do banner ads.
"If you roll all that up, and I'm a VP of Marketing at a company, I think again, how do virtual worlds fit into my overall marketing mix," said Richardson. "The answer to that in my mind is certainly to deliver time spent and the experience. The thought of where I can get the light touch and reach is a different proposition."
It's also worth noting that 9 minutes might not be out of the ordinary, and that does seem to be attracting more major clients.
"Those are pretty standard metrics for the clients we work with," said Richardson. "And on that note, it's probably worth mentioning that we are just getting ready to announce partnerships with 6 new companies, many of them are really top-tier brands."
He added that more information will come in the next few weeks.
The New Campaign
Looking at the eight-to-nine-minute time slot, the goal of the new campaign is to optimize the time spent with the user in three ways: refresh the club experience and make it more exciting, show off Scion as a leading brand with its concept cars, and make it easier for users to extend connections past those nine minutes.
"We specifically looked at how we could improve that experience within that nine-minute window, and a lot of things you'll see fit into that," said Richardson. "We provided more options for [the users] to buy things—not necessarily cars, but Scion merchandise—and made it easier in those nine minutes. We're also going to be introducing more functionality into Club Scion to make it a more engaging experience.
We want to keep it there, our members have said they like it, but we want to improve it. The campaigns are organic. They need to change with the community over time. They're dynamic, just like the community is."
One other organic element to the campaign is the addition of a secondary market for Scion parts in There.com. It's not just an issue of users customizing their own cars and selling them as a full vehicle, but swapping out component parts like tires and engines and re-selling those in There.com.
"I think you're going to see a secondary market emerging in There.com for those parts," said Richardson. "We think that will be a great way to keep excitement up."
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