Gaia Online: Context and Campaigns

Gaia Online: Context and Campaigns (1)
Shaping user perception, then, is an important part of what Gaia Online does during a branded campaign. It is of course beneficial to the advertiser, but it's also important to making the branded experiences feel like an inviting activity in Gaia rather than something intrusive. If Gaia  has done its job successfully, then the users value the campaign's branded virtual goods, at least in part, because they valued the campaign.

As far as that goes, it's often the items that tie themselves most closely to the gaia gold experience that end up becoming the greatest long-term successes, like the speed-boosting Nike shirt or a virtual cannonball promoting a Pirates of the Caribbean theme. The cannonball could be thrown at other users or the screen, giving it an obvious role to fill in Gaia's social interactions. The only items that really don't work are the ones that fail to have a sense of the playfulness particular to a virtual world.

"Sony's done maybe half a dozen movies with us, and the last few have been dramatically bigger than the first few because they've come to understand how Gaia works," said Hyrkin. "A great one was You Don't Mess With the Zohan, where they wanted to do a t-shirt, so we did something else, a cool hair dryer item. They saw the hair dryer did better than the t-shirt and they realized that more interactive and exciting items have more value."