CardMarketing 2.0

London. Early June. A limpid Saturday morning. Just gone half eight. I've pulled up outside Caffè Nero in Crystal Palace to buy my usual beginning of the weekend double tall skinny cap/skinny blueberry muffin (for me), double tall skinny latte/raspberry and Belgian white chocolate muffin (for her), and croissant to share (for them). Outside, the sun is shining and I feel, for a split second, faintly optimistic about life. That second soon passes.

American Express, take a bow. They, or the agency they use, have come up with a real mean 2.0 campaign. It's the mutt's nuts and has got a bit of everything: conversation, participation, user-generated content/voting, an alluring timeline, engagement with its cardmembers and endless possibilities. It's about what matters to Amex cardmembers and how these members can make a positive impact on the world around them. It's called The Members Project.

Wirecard Bank AG is the first German bank to set up shop in 3D online world, Second Life. The bank's virtual arm went live in mid-May and has been dubbed a "strategic positioning" by execs. Sounds impressive, but is it? Horace Artaud rocked up, ABN AMRO T-shirt and all, to find out...

The website of 70s band, the Grateful Dead, is currently being converted into a "full blown social network". Like I care, I hear you say. Well, you should because the development of websites into social communities is set to be one of the defining online events in the years ahead. The website, as we know it, is on borrowed time.

In the weeks ahead, I'm going to visit the islands, buildings or whatever of a number of different banking institutions in Second Life. I want to see what they're doing, what they're offering, whether it works and if, most importantly, it makes me feel excited about their products and brand. My aim is to try and find out if issuers should really bother to set up their own presence in Second Life. Will they simply waste time and money speaking to a load of spotty delinquents and social deviants with nothing better to do, or is it a virtual world that offers real commercial opportunities? My name in Second Life (in the unlikely event that you want to come and have a chat with me) is Horace Artaud.

Great IAB article on the exceptional opportunities offered by the hugely undermonetized in-game advertising market. While the piece offers some really solid insights into how the in-game ad space works, not least its web 2 potential, it also delivers some even better insights – drawn from die-hard online gamers – into how companies need to approach online communities.

... soaring yet again. According to research by UK-based, The Advertising Association (which will be published at length in the association's Advertising Statistics Yearbook 2007, to be published in June), online UK adspend rose 47% to £2,016 million in 2006, achieving a 10.6% share of total UK adspend. This is the first time it has surpassed the 10% mark.

Should online advertisers chase the long tail of niche sites or focus their attention on the short head of sites that most people go to day in, day out? This is a question raised by the Internet Advertising Bureau in a recent article. Do you target traffic with a capital T or focus your efforts on smaller, but more relevant audiences?

We've spoken once or twice before about how consumerdom, revolutionized by the second generation internet, is rapidly fragmenting into gazillions of micro communities and niches, whose members no longer have to tolerate products or services produced for a mass audience (perish the thought).