Going Virtual in 2008

In the world of Web 2.0, marketers are faced with a daunting task: Getting your message across to that prime target audience, Generation Y.

If you are a small to mid-scale venture capitalist with the desire to nurture an ambitious startup, then you’ve come to the right place.

In my previous blogs I touched upon one important emerging media technology, namely virtual MMOG environments, that are changing the way we do business and entertain ourselves online.

What we have to offer in addition to that new technology, is unique intellectual properties and a comprehensive business and marketing plan to implement these exciting developments to potential profitability. Coupled with that is my own twenty years of experience in the entertainment and technology industries. I’ve seen first hand what succeeds and what fails at the major studios.

Saito Syndication was set up to explore the possibility of following a new business model in anticipation of the next paradigm shift, virtual programming, and then to supply the entertainment vehicles necessary to fill that production demand. Our technicians are also hard at work developing a unique holographic broadcast technology that may well define the next step in home entertainment. In short, we have a grasp of what’s coming and how to exploit it to our advantage, owning and creating both the media technology venue and the intellectual property that supplies it.

The first of these is a concept we didn’t create, but we will re-imagine: The Virtual Mall. If you’d like an example of what I will be discussing, check out www.partypop.com, and go to their “online bridal show” section. This will take you to Active Worlds, a virtual reality website like Second Life.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE CUSTOMERS GONE? If you’re like most established storefront businesses these days, you’ve probably noticed a conspicuous lack of foot traffic going through the old community shops in your area. This could be attributed to a number of variables, not the least of which is the spiraling gas prices, and ultimately, people have less disposable income to play around with.

I’LL JUST SELL MY STUFF ON EBAY Ebay is an undeniable phenomenon. It’s wild popularity as the quintessential online trading site has made it a multi-billion dollar operation. Unfortunately, if you’ve talked to anyone trying to sell there nowadays, the competition is fierce and the profit margins are being gobbled up by revised posting costs and starting bids that are practically giving things away for free!

WHAT WILL IT REALLY TAKE TO SELL ONLINE? What needs to happen is a re-envisioning of the basic storefront business, a promotional concept that weaves together a “virtual community” that isn’t just a web ring or a faceless corporate entity like Ebay. That’s why everyone is looking for the next big paradigm shift in advertising. That’s why, for instance, Google dropped a cool billion for You Tube, a business that never even showed a profit!

My question is, why go to Second Life or Active Worlds when sometimes all you want to do is shop and buy? Why go to Ebay and fight it out trying to outbid a million potential bidders? Is that really the experience people have at a local mall? Or is it more about the tactile, aesthetic and community aspects of a shared experience, the simple act of shopping?

As we speak, major media corporations have already launched into the next prong of the technological marketing wave. A not-so-recent development called MMOG, which stands for Massive Multi-player Online Gaming, has established a firm toe-hold in the Generation Y psyche.

GET A SECOND LIFE Keep in mind that there are two distinct types of participants in Second Life: Those that buy strictly for the benefit of their virtual world game play, and those that are “hard product” online shoppers looking for real items to purchase and sell. The second group is growing exponentially and is by far the most important to us.

Existing virtual worlds like Second Life are very disorganized and haven’t clear business objectives. They want to “leave it to you” as to what their world will ultimately be. The wild west was never this messy.

Our first order of business will be to create our own virtual environment from scratch, uniquely suited to recreate a conventional mall environment. Some of the occupying businesses will represent actual brick and mortar shops depicting the physical stores themselves, others will merely have a virtual representation. All will have ACTUAL PRODUCTS to sell. This is far and away the most critical difference in our concept - we are only interested in REAL businesses with REAL products to sell.

These virtual malls will exist to service their immediate local areas, to facilitate the concept of enticing online shoppers to actually visit established locations. The name of the game these days is efficiency, and what we will afford shoppers is the ability to more clearly plan their shopping experience, saving both gas and time.

All this will be created by using off the shelf software that builds virtual 3D websites and, more importantly, be built by motion picture CG artists with that flair for accuracy and opulence. In other words, they won’t end up looking like the stilted Lego-style monstrosities of a Second Life.The shopping experience brought closer to the real.

State of the art multiprocessing techniques are now poised to render images as real as cutting edge motion picture quality CGI, in REAL TIME. Imagine handling a virtual object that looks IDENTICAL to the actual product.

Existing virtual worlds have many common shortcomings besides their garish design sense. Active Worlds clearly has the smoothest ease of motion but gives you no options to buy, sell or communicate until you pay for membership. Second Life actually offers free currency to get you started and has useful tools such as maps, search tools and teleporting so you can explore. But buying is mostly a virtual exercise.

They both have the look and feel of a role playing game, and as we know, business is not a game, and IMAGE IS EVERYTHING. You don’t walk into an Abercrombie and Fitch and expect to see Target.

IS YOUR STOREFRONT IRRELEVENT? The virtual mall is a FORCE MULTIPLIER. Simply put, it can make one “shop owner” appear to own and control several store-fronts selling several unique products.

Our plan is to create initial presences in the existing Second Life and Active Worlds, then make those customers aware of our new and separate mall site. In essence, using Second Life and Active Worlds as advertising tools for the more robust virtual mall environment we will be creating. Once on our site, customers will soon prefer the quality of our creation over the older, less planned out predecessors. This is where urban planning and decades worth of theme park environmental design aesthetics and experience come to the fore.

A very important and unique selling point of our company is that there are no amateurs here..

Online shoppers will be looking for the “unique selling proposition”, that extra something that catches their eye and stands out from the crowd. Another way of looking at VR marketing is as a virtual display or point of purchase kiosk. The physical storefronts can engage in cross promotions by displaying their virtual site within their stores themselves to remind customers who are not local, that they also have the fun option of visiting their virtual store online. One can even hand out free CDs to download the software and coach older, less tech savvy customers on how to use it on their home computers, much like Apple’s Genius Squad.

But our customers are not those storefront walk-ins, or even an online shopper. We can’t link our profits to a parade of lookie-loos or even a product or service. Like PartyPop, our client base will be the businesses and shop owners themselves, who are desperately looking for alternative ways of reaching their ever shrinking customer base. And, more importantly, corporate advertisers who are the most forward thinking in terms of promotion and marketing savvy.

In this arena, you cannot afford to leave your investment capital in the hands of twenty- something amateurs.

Virtual worlds or even virtual malls are not unique. It’s what you do with them, and the talent and experience you bring to the effort that will distinguish your brand in an ever crowded marketplace. Wouldn’t you really rather have motion picture professionals at your back than the average self-styled multi-media mavens or Linden Lab virtual volunteers? As in all things, you get what you pay for.

Andrew Keen, in his recent book “Cult of the Amateur” defines the problem accurately:

I think we're forgetting that the key to high-quality media is consumption. We're forgetting that traditional mainstream media, with its gatekeepers, actually brings significant value, not only in terms of our understanding of the world, but in terms of our civic identity and understanding and interaction.

By replacing mainstream media content, high-quality radio, television, newspapers, publishing, music, with user-generated content, we're actually doing away with information, high-quality information, high-quality entertainment, and replacing it with user-generated content, which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.

But we also see, I think, many of the worst developments in modern cultural life, and, in particular, I think we see what I call digital narcissism, this embrace of the self. It's Time magazine's person of the year for last year, was you.

I think the key to citizenship means listening, and reading, and consuming high-quality information and entertainment.

[I]f they are one of the 70 million bloggers, the hundreds of thousands of people posting their videos on YouTube, the tens of thousands of people doing editing on Wikipedia, for them to ask themselves, "Is this really valuable? Do I need to tell the world what I'm eating for breakfast? Do I need to tell the world what I think of the latest TV show?"

FILLING A NEED Filling a need means going where the popular technological trends take you. If it’s an iPod, then you service the downloading of music. Tower Records failed to service that need. If it’s movies, then your broadband service better pipe it into your home better than the next guy. Blockbuster Video is on the ropes. Seen a used book store lately? LA Times February 7, 2007 front page article announced the nationwide epidemic of used bookshops closing. These days you can’t give a book away. Why do you need a bookstore when you can download practically every book that was ever written?

Ignore a technological trend at your financial peril. Be a month behind on tooling up and watch that investment go up in smoke.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO ACCOMPLISH THE TASK? The remarkable answer is very little startup capital. That’s why the internet and its related technologies are such an attraction to many would be entrepreneurs.

A comprehensive business plan and cost breakdown is available to all interested qualified investors. This includes small scale, first time investors as well. We happen to think there are no small scale investors, only small scale thinking.

Let a team of seasoned professionals guide you to future profits. We have the know how, join us in an opportunity to be leaders in this new and exciting market. Qualified investors may reach us with any questions at blogvert@yahoo.com. Her's to all of us having a happy new year.