Few companies have taken to virtual worlds like MTV. They have six virtual world attractions based on original television shows right now, and another on the way called "Virtual Lower-East Side" which will be a replication of a large section of Manhattan. I called Matt Bostwick, Senior VP of Business Development MTV Networks' Music Group, and asked him why MTV got into virtual worlds in the first place.
For the most part it had to do with increasing the level engagement with the audience. "We asked: how do we go deep? How do we take a television, internet and mobile based audience and get them to engage more deeply with our brand?" Of course, engagement wasn't an end unto itself. There was a second question that needed answering: "How do you build new business models out of deeper engagement?"
Their first small tests were back in the summer of 2005. There weren't many non-game virtual worlds back then, but the results of the tests were encouraging. So that November, uncertain what existing technology could let them do or where it would take them, they proposed the concept a multi-platform avatar space. "I believe the comment at the time was: that's the scariest shit I've ever seen. Let's do it."
They began hunting for a platform. Initially they looked at Cyworld, but it was a little too simple. Second Life was just emerging from beta with around 175,000 registered accounts, but seemed pretty difficult to manage. Besides, everybody was putting set peices up in Second Life and walking away. Bostwick wanted MTV to go further, to actually be in the world interacting with the audience. The goal was "to really break down the barriers between fans and artists."
Eventually they settled on Makena's platform; it was youth-oriented, relatively stable, and easy for non-MMORPG players to adopt. They launced Virtual Laguna Beach in October of 2006, and it quickly filled with the exact same demographic that the show targets: 15-24 year olds skewed 80% female. It proved to be massively popular - so much so that they had to stop advertising it for awhile for fear of overloading the servers.
Users were frantically creating events, running clubs, playing and shopping. An active economy, in Bostwick's mind, was critical to engagement. They soon opened up skill ladders for hover-boarding competitions, paintball, and racing - but it wasn't all just games. Skill ladders for things like "fashionista" existed too, where you get rewards at each level. When they added the developer community to let people make clothing, they had "amazingly quick adoption of people wanting to make lots and lots of clothes." Within 30 days the number of stuff available for auction outnumbered what MTV had created by 4 to 1.
The audience was engaged, and it paid off.
It wasn't just that the shows ratings were good, but the results on every platform were off the charts. Time spent at the website, TV ratings, and DVD purchases all climbed dramatically. The question then became: "How do we scale this thing up from a couple of little show environments to a fully functional virtual world?"
If they were going to launch a full world, they knew that advertising was going to be a big part of the business model. They also knew that ads were going to have to be win-win for the community or they wouldn't work. At the time there hadn't been too many examples of this, with the exception of disruptive advertising in game worlds that never seemed to mesh quite right. "So far advertising in virtual worlds has been the 3d equivalent of popups and banner ads," says Bostwick, "So how do you create interactive experiences that are as fun as the content? In fact, how does it become content? That's the difference between advertising and what I call a branded experience."
Soon they were releasing The Virtual Hills, aspiring to be "less about escaping your real life into a second life and more about the virtual world running parallel to and enhancing your first life." The aspiration was to "come as you are and become what you want to be." The effort was to push engagement even further by not only enabling people to identify with their avatars but to also find out who they wanted to be in the real world.
The experiments seem to be working. As users are encouraged to take elements of the world and use them like they would in real life, voluntary brand communities are forming. People actually want to engage and evangelize the brand themselves.
The upcoming Virtual Lower-East Side will be the ultimate experiment in engagement: a virtual world closely modeling a real world environment. Will artists playing in a virtual version of a club call up the real club owner for a booking that they otherwise might not have? Will people who tend to spend time in a given bookstore go out of their way to spend time in MTV's online version of it? What new business models might emerge? The power of MTV's worlds isn't just in what they've taught business so far, but also in what questions they've helped us all to ask.
