Mercedes-Benz in Second Life

We're doing a little work around brands going into Second Life (buzz me for the 'white paper' or read the March 28 edition of B&T) so I hopped over to Mercedes-Benz's new installation last night to check it out. I've been ranting about brands in SL not offering much in the way of 'additional value', but rather demanding that residents interrupt their experience and come to them come to them to be marketed to.

This one's no different. There's a fun looking track - but with no cars to drive! There's stage full of instruments you can't play and a few posters of past models. Then I saw that they had a 'Mixtape' for download and thought, 'Nice! they've carefully designed a soundtrack for exploring'. So i went to grab it, but the 85Mb took nearly an hour! (I'd been downloading 40Mb files in 3 minutes slightly before). So by the time the mixtape came down, I had long since finished looking around Mercedes-Benz Island - there's just not that much to do. So possibly a lesson there: if you have offer complimentary visual and aural experience but one arrives an hour after the other, the consumer experience is ripe with discontinuity.

There is a veiled CLK ready to be revealed in March, but I'm not sure that will convince me to come back. Seems like another opportunity lost for a brand to do something really interesting on this platform.




Empty track from above - maybe I should have brought my Scion...