As someone who lives in L.A. county I can say, with experience, that the L.A. Times is often full of crap, reporting the opinions of the writers and editors as fact and calling that "journalism".

But this story doesn't surprise me at all. I am sick and tired of the over-commercialization of our entire society in general. You can't take a wiz without being advertised to anymore and I find it a bit stifling. I don't even watch TV anymore simply because of commercials. But this is the price we pay for living in a capitalist society and you know what? Despite all my grumblings, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Capitalism does offer a great amount of opportunity. I just wish advertising would back off just a bit. And I think Second Life is a prime example of this problem. *steps off soap box*

It took those insolent marketing people so long to realize they were being even more stupid than usual.

Of course they thought they were real smart for finding another landscape to smear their "content" all over. None of that was meant to suggest that advertising does not have its place and purpose of course. =]

Living a digital alternative life, complete with in your face commercials. It sounded lame then, it sounds lame now.

My thoughts on the numerous comments about brands leaving Second Life.

Firstly, remember that in many ways, Second Life (and other virtual worlds) is just another marketing channel, albeit with unique characteristics.

When companies run marketing campaigns on other channels (such as TV, radio or print) and the campaign fails to deliver the desired level of response, one of two things happen:

1. The creative concept is critised as not being appropriate or good enough. In other words it did not resonate enough with the target audience or deliver the right messages.

2. Expectations were too high in the first place. Either because they were not correctly analysed or the channel has a different set of metrics.

You rarely hear about the media channel being critised as being incorrect. Some brands have run campaigns in Second Life and the platform has been critised with very little commentary on the quality of the actual concept or the metrics being used to assess the success.

The concept of media planning in Second Life (understanding the attributes of the channel audience - what motivates them - what they want - what the platform can deliver) has been overlooked to a very high degree to date in Second Life. This is the area that successful virtual world campaigns should focus on.