WoW meets myspace.com - MTV establishes OnlineWorld

MTV is about to follow the big footprints Web 2.0 online communities such as youtube / myspace / TheSims. With Virtual Laguna Beach, the formaly most hippest teenage-network tries to catch up on the loosing target-group and finding new ways to bound their people into it.
As online-communities are supposed to have a strong addictive attraction, it is proven to make a respectful amount of dollars by either selling it to a bigger holding or trying to get your advertisers connected to it.

The expiriement MTV tries to do is beeing a pioneer to establish new selling channels, as the article on the topic explains. Offering a gold- or platinum membership to visit nightclubs or bying online property is not new though, as ebay shows in lots of auctions, like this $1000 for a WoW character. But to let Consumers & Customers meeting in an online environment, following up with a multi-channel market to buy their stuff offline afterwards is kinda new to me.

This obiously will start with a bunch of hip and very modern huge advertising firms - most I know don't even trust and fully get the CPM / CPC / CPA deal and still mistrusting the online-advertising. Even though most spent only a tiny percentage of the media-budget into online (~ 3- 5% avg) against the huge $ which is still invested into offline such as print / Tv / Radio, the recent ongoing boom in search is strangely attracting more and more advertisers each day. As online-statistics say, even the click-fraud is beeing ignored by most of them, making GYM (googleyahoomsn) and SEO such a success.

Now starting to place Ads into a virtual life-environment, counting online-purchases and somehow following the brand-sucess and the offline shopping tour later on (if some will be able to leave the office-chair anyway), it needs a whole new approach of counting-measurement and royality contracts. But no doubt ingame advertising will be the next boom, fully behavioural targeted, embedded into an adventure where most human are spending more time then in front of the TV or reading a newspaper, will still have to go a long road to insert trustworthy and efficient relationship between publisher & advertisers.

The OMD fair - biggest online-advertising in germany - offers a congress on wednesday about ingame-advertising, and you'll definitialy meet me there. However, I still stay away of MMORPGs as it's - as stated above - highly addicts onliner and consumes time as a gigantic black hole.

Keep you posted -- tomorrow night is our big OMD party, followed by 2 exhausting days on our stand. More likely I am not able to post early, but as soon as I can.
Daniel