A Virtual Underworld Connection

This weekend The Marketing Consigliere spent some time checking out Moviestorm, a British firm with an application that allows you to make your own scripted virtual world videos.  It had been a while since he toyed on Second Life, which almost seems passe now (and besides, you can’t get good cannoli there); but this sounded too cool.

He was really curious so downloaded the 25Mb installer and waited as it took its sweet time to load.  In the process of creating his virtual world video, the application crashed a few times, it was a bit on the clunky side, and not as intuitive as he would have liked.  Maybe his year-old Sony Vaio wasn’t up to snuff, but this first time took it about three hours to produce.

He patiently created his avatar (whom he named Tony “Websy” Avataro), choreographed his action, wrote and recorded his script, and uploaded background music.  While the creation tool did not give you the artistic license that Second Life gives you, The Marketing Consigliere was happy with the realism of the avatar – and Tony automatically lip synced his recorded message.  Check him out – he’s hanging out at some seedy strip mall, probably waiting to makes some “collections:”

Obviously Tony is a good-natured goombah who endorses The Marketing Consigliere.  This was user generated content that was a lot of fun to make and even more fun to watch.  Here are some questions:

– Will SMBs adopt this tool to create advertising for themselves?

– Will we be seing more avatars in corporate communications?

– Does this fit better for B2C marketing or B2B marketing?

– Should an avatar get the same cut on a deal as a real life capo?

– Do help or hurt my own “brand” by posting this video?

Lots of work, lots of questions… The Marketing Consigliere probably won’t touch the app again but it was a great learning experience.  He hopes this puts a smile on someone’s face somewhere.  He’ll get a more serious blog on marketing technology soon…