Virtual Worlds Forum, Part 1: ROE and AI
Okay, it’s nice to be home from London. Actually, it’s not. I really do like London, and could easily live there. Lisa, of course, would insist we still have a flat . . . er, condo . . . in Hollywood, but it could work.
Why was I in London, you ask? Well, I was at the Virtual Worlds Forum. I presented on ROI in Virtual Worlds, participated in a panel on The Future of Virtual Worlds, and was one of the mentors in X|Media|Lab London, where I talked with a number of extremely interesting people with fascinating ideas, including one who may have the answer to popularizing virtual worlds, a person who was asking about the world circa 2025, another who has just introduced an exciting new virtual world platform (see the following blogpost), and a firm that is interested in moving its 2D world for kids into the 3D space. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in the field!
“Wait a sec!” You might be saying. “ROI in virtual worlds? Aintnosuchthingforgettaboutit!” or “The future of virtual worlds? How can you begin to predict that?”
Well, I’d say that there IS ROI in virtual worlds. Yes. Today. Right now. Not in the way you can run a Google AdWords program, and say, “Wow, I’m paying $17 for an average $103 sale, so things are going great!” But it’s definitely more measurable, and probably more meaningful, than the ROI you get from your TV, print, radio, and outdoor campaigns.
Marketers love to say, “I got a $5 CPM." Meaning, they paid $5 to show an ad 1000 times. Of course, nobody may have seen the ad. It could have been a 2AM placement on the late late late late b-movie showing. Or a 4AM radio spot. Or an interstitial banner barely glimpsed as one clicks from theit MySpace console to their home page and back again. Good targeting for insomniacs, or people with extremely short attention spans.
But you can’t say. “X people watched that ad, and X people acted on it.” Except in terms of averages and anecdotes. All you can say is that the ad has been shown.
Virtual worlds are arguably more measurable than any other medium. Not only can we get the number of visitors, the time they spent, and the number who came back, we can measure individual user actions. Did they try that neat photo booth? Did they go under the waterfall? Did they take something? Buy something? All measurable. And you can even go so far as taking their avatar name and unique identifier, their UUID, which can be used to determine avatar creation date. This is a rich mine of information.
And it may be killing virtual worlds.
Why? Because the numbers are small. Tell someone you got 5,200 unique votes in 1 day, like we did with the 12avatars.com project, and they’ll laugh and say, “Yes, well, we ran an online contest where we had 52,000 votes in a day.”
When you probe a little deeper, though, things get interesting. Because those 52,000 votes in a day were done from a $1MM push through external media. And all those people had to do was to go to a web page and click a button. The people in 12avs weren’t driven by ANY promotional budget—the campaign was entirely in-world and pro bono, NO media spend whatsoever. And they had to vote in Second Life. On a very crowded 4-corner sim where it was hard to move around because of the lag. People had to spend minutes, or tens of minutes, just to vote.
And yet we had 5,200 votes.
Think about that for a minute. Against painful odds, 5,200 people showed up in a single day to vote in a virtual world. And that’s just the start. When you start looking past ROI, where ROI = “number of people who showed up” to what we call Return on Engagement, or ROE, the numbers start looking a whole lot more compelling. ROE measures much, much more deeply:
- Number of visits
- Number of individual visitor actions
- Total time spent
- Team or teams created
- Devices distributed
- Equivalent impressions (long tail media)
- Value of any mainstream press coverage
- Value of assets generated (vs photos, video)
- Value of the knowledge (vs RL research)
When you add up all of these results for 12avatars, and figure in the cost of our time (at typical agency rack rates), the return on engagement is actually quite compelling. If you’re interested in getting the full scoop on 12avs, just drop Fallon Winnfield an IM in Second Life, or JasonS in HiPiHi.
The kicker? ROE is only the beginning of the value model of virtual worlds. We’re working on a metric we call Attention Index, which could be a way to tie a virtual world campaign directly to exposure, in terms that large advertisers will understand. We’ll let you know more as we get out of the alpha stage on this.
