BigShinyThing

So the *shock horror* news from last week was that London ad agencies BBH and Leo Burnett are to open premises in Second Life. Leo Burnett think a virtual office will be a good way to run international business and BBH see possibilities in a virtual creative office. Well whoopee doo: virtual offices ain’t that new. HHCL did it back in the day (1998) with their MOO-based HowellHenryLand [full disclosure here -- BST's designer built hhland and BST's editor worked at HHCL]. As that experiment showed us, there is a valid space for virtual offices, but we would suggest that Second Life isn’t it.

This photo of a Second Lifer from The Economist this week shows why. Folks, the clue is in the name. Second Life is a place where people come to exercise their fantasies, not their reality. Second Life users don’t want this space to look like London’s Soho — they’ve already got one of those.

Maybe, if ad agencies and brands are smart they’ll use their Second Life presence to probe users’ ‘other’ life — the one where they have leather wings and flying rollerskates — to find out what drives peoples’ desires and leads them to want innumerable handbags. What ad agencies have to recognise about SL is that it’s (deep breath) Not Real. If they must be in Second Life, we’d like to see ad agencies get genuinely creative: how about BBH fire-bombing Leo Burnett from flying Llamas?

Anyways, isn’t SL well, just a bit emo? In our idle moments, we dream of the day when ad agencies and other brands try and invade the blood-and-guts online game World of Warcraft. After all, that MMORPG boast an impressive 7m subscribers to Second Life’s paltry 700,000. We’d also love to see who would win in a fight of Second Life users vs World of Warcraft but it would appear for now that these virtual worlds are not mutually inclusive. Shame. Designer Adidas vs. Broadsword +3? That battle would be short but very sweet. Ah well…

Here we have a classic example of ad agencies’ tendency to simply appropriate a new space as opposed to thinking about how to contribute to it. Witness the numerous feckless experiments we’re seen already with street art from the likes of PSP and Saatchi & Saatchi.

As Henry Jenkins tells The Economist, Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments”: it’s not just another territory — like New York — for ad agencies to plant a flag on as a PR wheeze.