It’s Springtime in Spain
First, a quick note. I just realized that I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon. So, in the spirit of Spring, I’m going to hop back on. Stay tuned. . . . .
I’m currently in Spain, speaking at the Radiate Group’s European Summit. Radiate is part of Omnicom and a world leader when it comes to experiential marketing. For those of you too lazy to click the link, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry — “Experiential marketing attempts to connect consumers with brands in personally relevant and memorable ways”. OK, it’s a broad definition, but from what I can tell, this refers to marketing techniques that have been around for a while but recently were grouped together and given a sensible category name.
Most of my talk focused on virtual worlds — explaining what they are and how brands and entertainment companies are using them. I tried to focus on the fact that despite the fact that Second Life gets 99% of the media attention, it really only accounts for about 1.5% of the 80 million total users in the category of virtual worlds.
There was a great moment about 5 minutes into the talk, when Radiate’s CEO Jay Lenstrom interrupted me and said, “So, are you guys going to put us out of business or are there good ways for us to work together?” When I got over the surprise at this question, I understood what he meant and answered. You see Radiate’s specialty is live event marketing: The Olympics, FIFA World Cup, Rolling Stones concerts etc. And what I said was that it really depends.
The promise of virtual worlds for the experiential marketing industry and brands is that we will be able to combine the aspects of live events and experience design that produce fantastic engagement with the aspects of the internet that lead to cost efficiencies and reach. And so I responded to Jay that the answer to his question really is in Radiate’s hands. If they embrace this new category, it can be a great value added service for their clients and a driver of revenue. Or, they could take a page out of the record company’s playbook. They could see a disruptive technology and instead of embracing it, argue about it until some outside force (iTunes) steps in and virtually replaces them. These guys are smart and my money says they’ll do the former.