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Liquid Beings

Avatar Marketing: Fake Places, Distributed Selves, Real Marketing


Understanding The AvatarMarch 26 2008

The avatar is a fairly new species. Hidden in plain site within the landscape of our digital world – but mostly overlooked, almost universally misunderstood and generally neglected.

Galateazabelin_carnivale2_2 I believe we can’t truly understand avatar marketing (or social media marketing) without gaining an understanding of avatars at a level that reaches deeper than a “best practices” list.  It isn’t easy to create a snapshot, since avatars are elusive, but framing a few things about them is a start to thinking properly about them.

Avatars are the beings that inhabit digital space, although they reach well beyond it.  The avatar is separate, yet indivisible from the person.  It doesn’t reside in a single place at a single time - it doesn’t operate within the constraints of time and space. It is persistent, yet not always present. 

Reality for the avatar is as distributed as their gaze – and their gaze is in constant multi-tasking motion, across the multiple windows on their desktops, across devices, acro

Fake Places, Distributed Selves, Real MarketingMarch 22 2008

Liquidbeing A new space, a blank scrap of web space on which to record my exploration of avatars, virtual spaces, our increasingly distributed attention and the quest we are on collectively for something real in a market-contrived world. These take us into “unreal” places.

These are the concepts marketers will have to deeply embrace in the early 21st century.  Who knows what lies beyond then?   I suspect virtuality, in its many forms, will be significant.

In the 25 years that I've been consulting with companies on business and marketing, there are really only two things that have come onto the scene that I doggedly insisted were absolutely systemic and would truly change the rules.  Those two are the Web and social media.  Today I am insisting the same is true of "virtuality." 

Every accepted medium springs from what is going on within the society - and in turn a culture springs from it, which then reflects back into the society at large, shaping it; changing it.

The web, social media and virtuality – each of these has or is changing our lives - each is changing us.  They are changing our language, and therefore the w