CardMarketing 2.0

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).

Just a Sunday afternoon thought. As affiliate programs begin to play a more central role in companies' marketing strategies, could issuers commercialize their relationship with cardholders?

If you needed any proof that blogs are wielding tremendous power – and are even beginning to eclipse traditional media in certain sectors – then look no further than what unfolded a few days back...

Most of you have probably heard of Twitter, although there's a good chance you haven't got around to checking it out (it's on the radar, but not the priority list). For those of you who haven't heard of Twitter, it refers to itself as 'a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives'.

Bill Gates didn't hold back this week. Speaking to an audience of online advertisers at the company's Strategic Account Summit in Seattle on Tuesday, he painted a bleak picture of the future for traditional media. You can check out the webcast or written transcript yourself here, but the following snippets from the speech will give you a basic idea of what was said.

With the rise of YouTube and other user-generated video sites, more and more issuers and banks are seeing their products and ad campaigns spoofed by amateur filmmakers who then stick their creations on the internet for everyone to see....

I tapped the words 'world of warcraft credit card' into Google this morning. I wanted to see what other people were writing on this new card issued by Visa, Blizzard Entertainment and First National Bank Omaha. I was taken aback by the amount of coverage the damn thing had generated, the sheer excitement and chit chat in blogs and other online forums. Within a matter of days, coverage of the World of Warcraft (WoW) card has gone through the roof. It's everywhere, and everyone is talking about it. This is the essence of viral, of word of mouth (WoM).

Issuers are at war with the mass. Or at least, they should be. The phenomenal consumer thirst for personalization, as covered in the previous post, demands that issuers start targeting niches, micro-niches and every kind of affinity group — however big, however small. These days, cardholders want a product and service that's relevant to them and rewards them in a way that's relevant to their interests, not everybody else's. Even when their interests include, well, blood elves.... Blood elves? Huh?

Google is going to town on personalization. On 1 May it announced that its personalizable homepage, the company's fastest growing product in 2006, would henceforth be known as iGoogle. Meanwhile, the world's largest search engine is adding new gadgets (the things you personalize your site with, e.g. calendars, weather forecasts, space invader games, To-Do lists, Notebooks, news feeds, Quotes of the Day and mini Wikipedias, etc) at a rate of knots.