Second Life Getting More Ads

Second Life, the virtual world that you truly need to become interested in, is experiencing a growth spike. MIT's ad lab blog has a post up about a number of new marketing campaigns that are taking place in Second Life, including a PR firm setting up an office, a concert by Duran Duran (and who's had more second lives than them?) and MTV seems to be planning an online version of their offline beach house.

What's going on here? Clearly, SL has a great big audience that is online for long stretches of time. But I think it may be even a bit more than that. In SL, people are specifically seeking out experiences that they may not have in the real world. Naturally, that's a part of any immersive game, but SL isn't about flying to Pluto or commanding armies of trolls or playing professional football. SL is not a fantasy world. In fact, it seems to go to great length to mirror the real world.

But, it does let you control and mold your personality and your world in compelling ways. That's, I think, part of the attraction of SL for advertisers. People are actively making parts of their personality known through what they look like, how they behave and (maybe most interestingly) what they build and contribute to the world.