Greenies Showed How to Do Metaverse Marketing Right — With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight (2007)

I recently mentioned how IBM’s presence in Second Life led to an unexpected backlash, so here’s a classic example of metaverse-based marketing done right — “Greenies”, an SL sim rendered in a giant-sized apartment users could explore like tiny ants:

[Greenies is] from a small British development company called Rezzable, which plans to use it for retail and events.  But where SL sites for large corporations like Dell, Sun, and Reebok attract but a few hundred visitors, Greenies is, with little official promotion, already bringing in several thousand visits per week. 

To make it a true Second Life experience, you need to bring your own sense of manic fun: explore the place with two Transformers, say, then a dancing fly and a silent crow on a WWII fighter plane, then maybe later on a flying hotdog, with reggae music streaming around you all the while.

But make no mistake, Greenies is still part of a company project– just a rare one where the company’s marketing demands don’t choke out any possibility of genuine delight. 

Greenies was the site of a successful L’Oreal campaign, with giant-sized renditions of the real life product situated in the apartment. (Pictured at right.)

Two other things that made Greenies notable as a case study:

It hired creators from within the Second Life community, people who knew the tools best and how to make experiences that were maximally delightful.

And it also incorporated other real life brands into the experience in an organic way: 

Greenies’ lead developer, Pavig Lok, [has] traded notes with fellow 3D builders who’ve created marketing sites for other real world clients.

“The feedback I’ve been getting from many of the folks that do commercial builds is that in the process of realizing the clients’ requirements, they usually end up watering the build down ’till it’s of limited interest,” she tells me. “So it’s not that there isn’t a whole population of SL artists champing at the bit to produce cool fun builds, it’s that the people who could let it happen don’t.

By contrast, she goes on, Rezzable hired Pavig and her team, and gave them the freedom to realize the Greenies space.  “Light Waves does the Greenie sculptures that got famous from sandboxes maybe six months ago.”  Pavig worked with him and LittleToe Bartlett to realize a place that seems like an immersive Pixar movie.

The irony is, Greenies does include several real world corporate brands that have had less successful runs at their own SL locales.  I nod to the giant soda bottle behind us. “It occurred to me Coke would be scoring huge impressions now if they were actually paying you to have that bottle here.”

“Coke did a clever thing,” she says. “They freed up their trademark for use in-world— they recognize they get more out of their branding here if they let people actually use it. So for them it’s free advertising and for us it’s an artistic borrowing that’s instantly recognizable.  I hate to say win-win, but that’s how it works for them.  And embellish it to a positive effect, without breaking the world’s underlying structure.”

Yes: Coca Cola was officially in Second Life back then and encouraged community creators to implement their famous trademark into their experiences. Read my original story about Greenies here.