A Wider Net

Dan Parks, President/Creative Director for Corporate Planners Unlimited, Inc, has created a first-of-its-kind virtual convention center in Second Life. He recently gave me a tour and I will admit - this experiment is an example of extraordinary vision that could only have come from someone who had spend 20 years in the event industry. You owe it to yourself to try this out at your first opportunity. I will try to explain what it is and why I think you need to see it.

By the way - the image above features the exhibit hall on the right, the convention rooms on the left, and two skyscraper towers in the background. The “smoke” is actually low-flying clouds. See the thumbnails at the bottom of this post for the really high-res shots I took.

First, since there are still many people who have no idea what Second Life is, let me expend a paragraph on that topic. Non-Newbies can skip ahead. Second Life is a computer-generated world that you access through a free downloadable application - the Second Life Browser. Using this application, you can create a graphical 3D representation of yourself - an avatar - that you manipulate like a puppet within the second life world. It doesn’t have to look like you (it can be a different gender or even species) but it is what you will look like in this second life. Using this avatar, you walk or fly around this fantasy world, meeting other users, experiencing wild places, chatting, playing games, etc. It’s like a video game except it isn’t nearly as much fun. In fact, there’s very little to do in Second Life that the average working professional would find interesting. Companies like The Gap have spend big bucks setting up virtual stores and virtual hotels in Second Life only to find a lack of participants and a similar lack of real money. Ironically, the company most vocal about not wasting money in Second Life, IBM, is also one of its biggest investors, participants, and technology partners.

Two significant things have changed within Second Life that have changed my perception of it’s value for marketing and event professionals. First, a Massachusetts company called Vivox has introduced a voice chat technology that enables Second Life users to converse with other users by simply talking through a standard computer microphone or headset. It’s a free call anywhere in the world. You can talk privately person to person or talk openly in crowds. This is a surprisingly cool ability. As you walk near other people in Second Life you can join their voice conversations. This means that, in a business meeting, you can introduce yourself and network with other attendees. It is the most face-to-face experience I have ever seen online.

The second significant change within Second Life is the construction of Virtualis by Dan Parks and his team of hired guns - architects, landscapers, and designers. They have built a monumental convention center and meeting facility within Second Life and it will soon be open for business. It would take far more text than a mere blog post would stomach in order to fully explain all there is to see and do at Virtualis, so I will stick to the bullet points and get to why this is important. First, Virtualis has a massive virtual exhibit floor, complete with large 3D exhibits. You will be able to watch streaming videos, examine product information, and talk “face to face” with booth attendees. They have even come up with the ability to webcast live from the real world, using any standard webcam, into these exhibits for the purpose of product launches, product demos, and presentations. No other virtual trade show comes close to this level of functionality, attendee mingling, and user experience.

Virtualis also has a large ballroom and many smaller meeting rooms, all found within a beautiful glass building lined with waterfalls and other interesting visual elements. In the ballroom, Parks has provided a variety of meeting support services including a dance floor, a follow spot, podium, and presentation areas. Two nearby skyscrapers are loaded with meeting rooms and areas dedicated to the press. In fact, an outdoor ampitheater is equipped with multiple live virtual video cameras that can actually webcast a press conference out of second life to the real world.

Other features include a massive yacht full of meeting rooms (that may be private - I’m not sure), an outdoor learning facility with all sorts of special effects and presentation capabilities, and a koi pond.

Because you can participate in group activities, network and speak to other visitors, give and receive video and slide presentations, and browse exhibit halls, this is a fairly complete meeting experience. You just have to remember to find food in the real world while your avatar sits in a hot tub on the yacht.

It isn’t perfect, however. As I mentioned in previous posts, Second Life is an unstable and rapidly growing platform. It is not ready for you to abandon your sales meeting in Fiji to save money by having it at Virtualis. This is an experiment. You can book 100 people or so to attend an experimental summit or exercise here. Some will have trouble connecting, and some will have trouble navigating. It is a very new and very demanding technology. It is, first and foremost, a vision of what can and probably will be done with the next generation of Second Life or a competing platform. If the underlying technology were bullet-proof, and if the user interface were more intuitive, and if everyone had the necessary computer horsepower and bandwidth - then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this as a real meeting solution. All the pieces are there. For now, I recommend seeing it, experiencing it, and keeping a close eye on it. Book a meeting there with nothing but your most adventurous audience and enjoy it with your virtual guests - but expect the few problems I mentioned. And when this technology is robust and real, you can say you’ve been “with it” since the beginning.

Highres pics:

If you want your attendees to think you’re fun and a little wreckless, follow this three-step plan:

1. Put your logo on these

2. Put one at every seat

3. Serve lunch

Thanks again Gizmodo.

I probably shouldn’t be giving up more links over to Gizmodo after the TV-B-Gone stunt but they have a very good point with this post that I had been meaning to highlight. At CES last week, IBM utilized female ambassadors with LCD screens embedded in their T-Shirts. This, by itself, is neither a problem or unprecedented.

They added a line of text to the shirt that says “Stop Talking. Start Doing” which is subtle, yet still fairly inappropriate. But it’s the fact that they require these women to say to viewers of their shirt-screens “Are you looking at my chest?” that puts them over the line. The outfit is ugly, the campaign is stale, and this tactic is embarrassing.

IBM - you’re a brilliant company with tons to offer. This doesn’t suit you.

In a recent issue of Lighting Dimensions magazine, Chauvet Lighting took out two consecutive full-page ads promoting their new campaign “Green Thinking” as a method of driving traffic to their exhibit at Lighting Dimensions International (LDI) 2007, the premiere lighting trade show in the United States. It resulted in a two-sided page with mostly images of green leaves and white space. In fact, one side featured no product shots at all - just green, white, and this sentence:
“Chauvet is a leader in eco-illumination for the entertainment industry with the wides range of innovative, earth-friendly LED luminaires.”
I’m sure the folks at Philips Solid State Lighting (formerly Color Kinetics) would have some issue with that claim, especially since some of the Chauvet technology is licensed from Philips, but that’s not what this article is about.

Surprisingly, there aren’t many LED-based lighting manufacturers jumping heaving onto the “green” marketing bandwagon. You certainly hear about big stage shows talking about their switch to LED as a way to save energy, but not the lighting makers themselves, at least not in the entertainment space. I was very pleased to see the ad and decided to take a look at Chauvet to see what else they were doing with their “Green Thinking” campaign.

Unfortunately, they have not done much with their new campaign on their website. I was expecting (hoping, actually) that they had integrated it thoroughly into their corporate marketing and even their strategy. “Green Thinking” was only exposed on the website as a small element of a graphic promoting their tiny LED-powered moving spotlight called the MiN Spot. Also, their corporate mission has nothing in it about green values whatsoever. I am close to calling this a greenwashing campaign, but the LED lighting is a very green technology and I will simply suggest that they should try harder to highlight that.

There was a nice article on their site about an outdoor holiday tree lighting project they did for St. Paul, Minnesota. In it, they claim that the switch to LED lights dropped the power bills from $1,300.00 to approximately $130.00, and carbon emissions from 18.7 tons to about 4 tons, according to an estimate from the Minnesota State Energy Office. Pretty impressive! LED Lighting has become a highly effective and technically viable solution for events and while it does cost a bit more to specify, is a reasonable way to reduce energy costs on your events and exhibits.

Chauvet, a company best known in the nightclub market, really made it’s presence known at LDI by winning Best Big Booth. They captured that booth experience on video and delivered it through their website. While the video was way too long at 45 minutes, I heartily applaud the use of video to extend the reach and value of their booth. The also have their own YouTube video channel but the LDI booth tour is not on there (length issue, maybe?).

In summary, I give high marks to Chauvet for playing the green card in their LDI booth promotions, but low marks for not integrating it onto their website and corporate mission. Also, I love their use of video and their channel on YouTube - they just need to package the booth tour better. If you’re considering the impact of lighting on your next event, talk to a good lighting designer. Most professional lighting designers are now well-versed in the ins-and-outs of LED and other low energy lighting solutions. If you have set goals to make your events or exhibits more green, then LED lighting should be part of your plan.

Thanks to Sue Pelletier tagging me, I am obligated to share 8 things you may not know about me. When did this meme all start? It’s the blogging equivalent of a chain email but without the promise of ultimate riches or karma. It’s supposed to be a random list, and that rubs my marketing & communications sensibility the wrong way.

Anyhow, here goes:

1. I own a (musical) keyboard, an electric guitar, and a tin whistle. I am as fast-fingered as I am musically untalented, making for a consistently awful listening experience.
2. I seem to be two notches above half-bad at the video game Rock Band. Who needs real instruments, anyway? (My gamertag is “Fool Throttle”)
3. My first record album, that wasn’t a hand-me-down, was “Boston”, my first 8-track was Kiss: “Alive!”, my first cassette was “Blizzard of Ozz” and my first CD was the BSO playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on Telarc. I have no idea what my first MP3 was. I’m now a neo-classical progressive metal junkie. Go figure.
4. I was once asked, by one of the biggest event impresarios in the world, to make a laser effect that was so huge that it made the Japanese audience think of Hiroshima. Years later, I was asked to create the illusion of the Firebird hovering over the walls of Jerusalem. Sometimes people take a twisted view of entertainment.
5. I have written several plays, one-acts, and a musical libretto. Half were performed. I miss doing that.
6. I have a t-shirt and a tennis ball autographed by Ivan Lendl, whom I admired when I used to play a ton of tennis. I have, in fact, more autographed Lendl merchandise than I do friends who know who he is.
7. My favorite book is “The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks. It was written and published almost simultaneously with the original theatrical release of Star Wars, and is almost the same story (except with elves and wizards). I am convinced Terry Brooks and George Lucas are the same person. If I ever get to meet George Lucas again, I intend to ask him.
8. I was once part of a team that had to build a house, or at least all the pieces of a house, while riding on the back of a huge flatbed truck in a parade, using only colonial-era hand tools. I was 9. I made shingles out of cedar using a drawknife. I still remember the smell and the odd taste of lemonade in a pewter cup dispensed from an oak barrel.

I tag: Andrew Vande Moere, Rob Larsen, Scott Kiekbusch, Ilya Vedrashko, Steve Paine, Margaret Desjardins, and Bill DeRouchey. Close enough.

Boooooooo to Canon. They sent me this (twice today):

Click the image to zoom in. With it, I can enter to win tickets to the Super Bowl. The medium print says “next year”. The fine print says “2009″. So here I am, a relatively young male living in New England, just days before the Patriots attempt to go to 18-0 and gain an opportunity to win another Super Bowl championship in a couple of weeks. I’m the perfect demographic to attract to a promotion like this for THIS YEAR.

Booooooo - no entry for me, thanks.

Pizza Hut, the $5billion pizza giant (they are 50 times larger than Papa Ginos - who knew?), just added support for mobile phone orders. The next two largest pizza chains, Dominos and Papa Johns, had already entered that space to some extent.

Hungry football fans can order pizza using their mobile browser or text messages. Pizza Hut aims to receive half of their order via online or mobile within five years.

As a logical progression, soon we may see these pizza chains offering special code scan promotions that look like this:

Here’s how it works: Pizza Hut would print these on ads or coupons. Users simply snap a photo of the image using their phone and a free scanning widget they get from a company like NWW who makes ConnexTo. The system decodes the code and connects their phone to Pizza Hut where they can place an order and receive whatever promotion they were offered with the printed ad. These things can probably be highly personalized, so a digitally printed image on a postcard can tell the Pizza Hut system precisely who the buyer is, look up their buying history, and give them a well-targeted offer.

I guess in that last scenario you’d have to be careful not to share those coupons with your friends. They may discover your deep, dark secret passion for pizza with anchovies, pork rinds, pickled beets, and gummi worms.

Steve Jobs’ 2008 Macworld keynote came and went the other day, as did my carefully written post about it. So upset was I, at accidentally overwriting half of it, that I shelved it until today. Ever been there?

Anyhow, I felt that having just written a retrospective comment about last year’s big Macworld revelation, the iPhone, it would seem logical to follow it up with something about this year’s keynote. This year’s keynote had it’s share of major announcements, although none of them quite as significant as the iPhone and none of them were strong enough to keep the stock market from plummeting that day on bad retail news.

Here were the major points from the keynote:

- iPhone and iTouch will get new software. The iPhone gets a free firmware update including a Google-driven mapping system that creates GPS-like functionality without actual GPS hardware in the phone. It works by triangulating the position of the phone from three nearby cell towers. Run out of nearby cell towers, and you run out of functionality for this service. Presumably you will also run out of roads to choose from anyway. The iTouch gets a suite of applications that should have been on the device to begin with including mail. The early adopters get to pay $20 for the update while new buyers get it for free. That’s two slaps in the face to early adopters in a year. Goodness, this brand is teflon.

- Apple TV Take 2 - A new, cheaper version of Apple’s set top movie and TV download-and-player is now able to operate without a Mac. So the price drop from $299 to $229 is actually a price drop from $2299 to $229 - if you count the previously necessary Mac. It also can download podcasts, designed for a 2″ screen, and feed them to your HDTV, maybe a 40-60″ screen. That will be a bit like looking at dust mites under an electron microscope - really nasty when magnified. Kudos to Apple, however - this service has a chance for success with every major studio already on board.

The significance of this product is amplified by the fact that Apple also announced a new laptop (See below) and neither the laptop nor the Apple TV box contain any support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Apple has quietly yet profoundly declared the high definition optical disc format war, recently claimed over and won by the Blu-Ray camp, totally irrelevant. Downloads are the future. Microsoft was thinking the same thing, as their XBOX movie and TV download service had managed to grow to twice the size of their nearest competitor. This will certainly impact our video production and media authoring plans in the near future. I am very interested to know what the cable TV industry has to say about this product. I suspect they have something cooking.

I am also a little surprised that Apple TV has no user-rating functionality (at least, I don’t think it does). This is a big part of YouTube, and even Blockbuster and Netflix allow users to rate their content. The lack of community and peer recommendation within Apple TV and, for the most part, iTunes continues to disappoint. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to have preference-based recommendation engine like Blockbuster or Amazon. They seem to be completely blind to the process of media discovery by users.

- New Laptop. Easily the biggest news from Steve Jobs was the unveiling of the MacBook Air. An impossibly thin yet technically superior machine, the MacBook Air is as beautiful as it is respectable. It is a green machine (mostly biodegradable or biorenewable), and it is a pricey machine ($1,800-$3,200 ish). While the trend in notebooks has been toward the cheap, Apple and, to a certain extent Sony, have opted to maintain premium models to keep up their brand image.

You can check all this stuff out, and more, at Apple.

The keynote seemed to drain the life out of the whole internet. Everything ran slower. It worried me that all these new iTunes movie rentals are coming through Akamai, the same delivery network we were using to produce a live webcast at the same time as the keynote.

Footnote: The coverage of the keynote was extraordinary. Apple refuses to webcast the event, which is beyond belief. Instead, a legion of live bloggers, twitterers, and phonecam streamers delivered us the news guerilla-style. And it looked bad. Apple should really control the way it looks, and if they can’t keep a lid on it, they may as well broadcast it or allow it to be done right. This blog even listed all the top coverage and updated it in real time with the status, since many went down under pressure. QIK - a beta live phone webcasting system had a few brave souls trying to webcast it live, with very poor results. I still think they’re onto something BIG.

Last January, Apple deflated the giant CES press juggernaut by launching the iPhone a few hundreds of miles away at Macworld Expo. This year, a year after it’s unveiling, CES suffered the same scene-stealing effect, and Macworld hasn’t even happened yet! Dozens, and it felt like hundreds, of new cell phones were unveiled at CES and almost everyone one of them was compared to the iPhone. Surprisingly, the general consensus seems to indicate that not one of them beat, or even matched, the iPhone.

You have to admire Apple’s brand strength and the game-changing ability to shake up an industry that Apple had no prior experience in, and according to some technical analysts, no business being in at all. If you perform a Google search for “compared to iphone CES” you will find pages of search results showing a sample of the comparisons being made between the products at CES 2008 and the iPhone from Macworld 2007 (which, I seem to recall, had more features than the version that ultimately hit the streets).

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how crappy the phone really is as a phone. Similar to the iPod, it falls short compared to its competitors in many ways. No support for Exhange or Lotus Notes makes it terrible for enterprise users. The browser can’t play flash movies so they conned YouTube into making special versions of their most popular videos just for iPhone users. The memory is very limited and it has no expansion capability. It has zero physical buttons - a mistake that pretty much every wanna-be at CES was not willing to make. And most importantly, it’s stuck on AT&T which, according to most users and Consumer Reports, is in a dead heat with Sprint for the bottom of the barrel for quality and service. Not to mislead - it’s a marvelous product in many ways, too. Its combination of small combined with easily the most intuitive user interface and robust media capabilities make it a delight to play with.

I am particularly grateful that Apple entered this market, even though I will never get one as long as they are stuck with AT&T. The changes in the phones that have already resulted form their entry are remarkable, even though a little short of being truly competitive from a gadget sexiness perspective.

What can we, as marketers, learn from this? Two rather obvious things:
1. Customer loyalty can too easily be undervalued. Oddly, Apple built that loyalty with great products and great marketing but to my knowledge, they didn’t do it by publicly listening to them. You may find it easier and better to do it in plain sight.
2. Recognizing a market that is completely saturated with second-rate products like the previous generation of cell phones is good business. It’s easier to stand out when everyone else is wearing the same shade of gray.

Photo from All About Symbian

Saw this on Gizmodo and had to highlight it for our team and community: The Free Air Guitar promo:

From Ad Goodness