Toyota advertises the Scion in Second Life
Toyota has launched an advertising campaign for the Scion (an automobile model) in Second Life. It’s one of those ingenious advertising campaigns where they actually get people to pay to use the advertisement. Seriously. They’re selling a virtual version of their car dubbed the Scion xD for L$300 (which translates to about US$1). It’s not that expensive, but then again, why in the hell should people have to pay money to take part in an advertising campaign?! There’s already lots of good, free stuff inside the game world that isn’t making money for mega corporations, so why should we have to pay for the stuff that is?
Toyota has also created a destination inside of Second Life called Scion City. I suspect it’s going to have a huge rush of people at the very beginning due to the high-profile exposure of the front-page CNN article on it (seriously, what?!), but I imagine it’ll drop off very quickly within a week. Also, I wonder how many thousands or tens of thousands some Second Life ace was contracted for to make this zone. CNN also gets the number of residents wrong, saying Second Life has “1.2 million residents”. This is not as bad as the estimate we saw earlier this month, but it’s still an over-estimate by about one order of magnitude. Where exactly are these newspeople getting the numbers from anyway? Just making it up? Asking Linden Lab, who seem to give a different number each week, and then taking the response at face value? Do some real journalism dammit!
Anyway, the Second Life hype machine runs along at full bore. I cannot possibly fathom how some minor virtual marketing ploy deserves a front-page mention on CNN, but there it is.
