Adidas opened a store in Second Life last week to promote its a3 Microride sneakers. This is not the company’s first foray into the game space; last year Adidas announced it would make its Hyperride shoes part of the upcoming PSP title Freerunning. Adidas follows the growing number of other brands that have already established presence in the virtual world: Scion and Starwood are the most recent additions, and American Apparel has set up its own boutique earlier this year.
The store sits on a private island away from the Second Life’s mainland. Besides the store itself, the Adidas complex includes a dome that projects a branded video clip, a few billboard installations, and an orange “testing area” trampoline to demonstrate the shoes’ “bouncy” positioning. The shoes themselves contain a script that makes avatars jump to the sky.
The interior is spacious and is built to accommodate convenient camera controls. The video screens on the sides play the same promo spot and invite visitors to check out the Adidas campaign site What’s Next. Besides this brief mention of the site’s URL and a bookmark you receive with your purchase, it doesn’t seem the website and the Second Life store are tightly connected. The site has a store locator feature and it would have been a nice nod to the Second Life’s fan base if it had mentioned the Second Life outlet. Unlike the American Apparel store, Adidas here sells only one SKU – the a3 that comes either in white or red and black styles. There are no attendants behind the counters and you buy the shoes by clicking on one of the boxes and paying 50 linden dollars (about 20 real-world cents).
Earlier:
Starwood Launches The First Virtual Hotel
Ilya runs the R&D group and studies the relationships people build with different traditional and emerging media. 
It seems that many companies are missing a small but growing phenomenal marketing tool called Ad-Plug™. One would think Adidas would want to put their advertising in the hands of every “Gamer” that picks up a controller to play a variety of sports games. More surprising, is why EAGames is not using an Ad-Plug™ on every disk they produce. Peter Moore of XBOX fame is looking at it but perhaps the others just have not heard about Ad-Plug™ yet.
MTV is launching a social community virtual world with virtual laguna beach. i’ve got a sneak peek into the beta version, although it’s a bit buggy. i’m supposed to be attending the winter formal tues night. now, what to wear? my avatar is not dressed for the occasion yet but with MTV bucks, i can upgrade my outfit. it’s a pretty cool concept. check it out at: http://www.vlb.mtv.com/
[...] More info [...]
[...] Eso a llegado a tal punto que hoy, un jugador puede adquirir créditos para su personaje con plata real, en ‘SecondLife’, el Linden Dollar, y de allí darse una vuelta por las tiendas de varias marcas como Adidas por ejemplo, para vestir a su avatar. Y eso mueve obviamente muuuuucho dinero. ¿No me creen? Si incluso el Wall Street Journal menciona ese fenomeno. Ya se habla que más allá de la ropa, el arte digital, el automovilismo (con iniciativas como la de Toyota y su modelo Scion que fue lanzado en ‘SecondLife‘) también ya estan ingresando en ese territorio … [...]
[...] At the risk of going into Second Life overload this week, I would like to call you attention to Bruce Nussbaum’s Business Week Online blog posting today entitled “Second Life, MySpace, YouTube–It’s All About Mining Intentionality“.
Awesome, man
[...] hasn’t stopped Coke, the NBA, Wired, CNET, Adidas, Coldwell Banker, Sears and others to open up shop, often investing as much as $500,000 per year to [...]
[...] they were comfortable with, like billboards and product demos. See Coke, the NBA, Wired, CNET, Adidas, Coldwell Banker, [...]
One would think Adidas would want to put their advertising in the hands of every that picks up a controller to play a variety of sports games
Hey! Can I ask what’s this template you are using in your blog? thanks.