“Tis the season and since it’s snowing on Millions of Us sim, I thought it would be nice to share this video Holiday card we just did for the folks over at Leo Burnett Detroit (just blogged by Adrants) For some reason, nothing makes me as happy listening to Run DMC do Christmas in Hollis around this time of the year. Masterfully produced by Kathleen Craig and Michael Verdi. Enjoy!

It’s been a crazy few weeks — so much so that sometimes we forget to blog about interesting client releases. Last Tuesday, as we were preparing for the launch of CNET’s headquarters in Second Life, we were also frantically preparing a magical apple tree beneath a glass dome for our new client, Leo Burnett Worldwide. The tree can be found here and there’s been all kinds of cool coverage, including this piece in Adage and this article in the Independent.

The apple tree is cool in a few ways. First, it’s a creative way of handling the “Coming Soon” idea for which the web had ugly pages saying “Under Construction”. The apple tree is especially meaningful for the Burnett agency. Leo Burnett, the founder, was the originator of a school of advertising that moved away from wordy ads that compared products’ features and toward corporate symbol that brought out the “inherent drama” of a product. The apple tree was his own version of this (and one that I particularly identify with as a startup CEO). Naysayers told him that he’d soon be out of business and selling apples in the street so he instituted a tradition of having fresh apples on every desk. So I guess you could say that the marketing of so many modern products (including Apple) have Burnett to thank. And as a company devoted to heightening that exact ‘inherent drama” Burnett spoke of (our headquarters is a theatre after all), we’re really flattered to be involved. By the way, Burnett went from startup to an agency that currently has 90 offices in 72 countries and does amazing creative work.

How do you like them apples?