Didn’t realise that I was behind the curve on brands having their own worlds until an Electric Sheep blogger Satchmo Prototype put me right. Now I find out that “brand universes” are the brand dish du jour.
Yahoo!’s given away 100 “brand universes” to top brands, including Wii…
The site’s kind of a social media portal, feeding in Wii links from del.icio.us and Flickr (both owned by Yahoo!), message boards and cute touches like Wii-branded clothing for your Yahoo! avatar.
According to BrandWeek:
The brand universes are Yahoo!’s answer to the popularity of advertiser outposts on hot social media sites like MySpace and YouTube. On MySpace, advertisers have flocked to build profile pages to connect with consumers, while YouTube is leaning on “brand channels” to attract users.
Yahoo! seems to be trying to emulate the success of social media-based fan sites that are out there. It isn’t charging the brands to set up the portals.
Interesting approach, wonder how it will work out for them. Yahoo! says 250,000 people visited the Wii in the first 24 hours.
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