Filed under: Odds and Ends, Mixed Reality
"Advertisements ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that they work at all, on an inattentive public."
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 3.
To the extent that I turn my television on, and soak up bland and homogenous pop-culture funded by five minute blocks of 30-second pleas for my money, there's one virtual world who turns up again and again. Hour after hour. Day after day. Habbo Hotel.
No ActiveWorlds, There.com or Second Life grace the flickery phosphor dots of this window onto the culture that everyone seemingly would like me to have. No Lineage, Final Fantasy, City of Heroes, or World of Warcraft. Habbo Hotel.
Seemingly breathless, seductive voices seek to seduce us into this isometric 2d world which looks -- call me spoiled -- like a precursor to the 1994 SNES game Earthbound, yet try to maintain a reassuring "don't be afraid, this is very normal and pedestrian" tone to them. Certainly a juggling act of pitch and presentation few could pull off successfully. And curiously, nobody seems to know if it's pitched at the young teens (which is the major media perception) or at the adults (since the Australian Habbo Hotel TV ads seem to be wedged between advertising for phone-sex $4.95/minute) -- or it would be more correct to say that everyone knows where it's pitched, and everyone seems to hold a different opinion. The USA Habbo says it's a teen community. The Australian Habbo seems pitched at a more adult audience.
It makes me wonder about MMORPGs and virtual worlds both. There's a general dearth of television commercials. World of Warcraft got one just a few weeks back which saw limited release. You would think there would be rather more, rather often (eg: Habbo Hotel's daily onslaught). Why aren't there more? Too expensive? Too scary? Too hard to figure out what to say about them? Too likely to come to the notice of Jack Thompson?
Would regular television spots for Second Life even work? Would they bring attention and understanding from your peers, or would they bring down the ridicule of your friends and co-workers?
"You have only 30 seconds [in a TV commercial]. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull ... When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire."
- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 111.
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