There's an ongoing debate in the virtual worlds industry about how the effectiveness of marketing or advertising campaigns should be measured. Is it about pure numbers of users, or about the amount of time they're engaged for? Many advertisers tend towards the former, while many virtual worlds would like to convince them of the merits of the latter. A new study by Forrester Consulting may help.
The company has been taken on by a group of virtual worlds firms to investigate “marketing and engagement measurement in virtual worlds”. Those in the group include Millions Of Us, Sulake, Gaia Interactive, Metaplace, SceneCaster, Doppelganer, Vivaty and WeeWorld. Note, no Linden Lab, Disney or MTV in there (well, not yet at least - the group says more companies are expected to join).
The study will be aimed at chief marketing officers, brand managers, advertising agencies, media buyers and journalists, and the aim appears to be to convince them to look beyond user numbers to other metrics. Or, as the announcement puts it: “The study will explore the thesis that the virtual worlds industry is beginning to mature and is no longer in the ‘experimental’ phase of the marketing bell curve, and the need to quantify and measure the quality of ‘engagement’ rather than CPMs (or cost per thousand ‘impressions’)”.
The study is expected to be finished by June. Engagement is clearly an important metric to judge the success of virtual worlds, but it’s hard to see advertisers and brands ever completely breaking away from their focus on reach - the pure number of users in these worlds. And, of course, the traditional advertising/branding principles still hold true - having a bunch of heroically engaged users is only of use if you have the demographic data to prove that they’re the people a particular brand wants to engage with…
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