I haven’t been to an Imax theater yet, so I have no opinion on anything concerning it, but an interesting marketing campaign was run in SL, This Second Marketing Llc. hired about 2 dozen avatars and paid money, real money even, to act as virtual street teams that handed out promotional items like virtual 3-D glasses, Imax T-shirts, directors’ chairs with the Imax logo and virtual movie tickets, which you could redeem for real life movie tickets, but with only about 300 being released. They are saying that this is the reason Imax broke all of its box-office records.

According to Imax and This Second Marketing, 15,099 unique avatars engaged in conversation about the Imax “Potter” and accepted promotional items during 840 total hours of street marketing efforts in the week surrounding the Warner Bros.’ film’s July 11 opening. The campaign logged 25,189 individual Imax brand interactions when including all conversations with Second Life avatars, many of which occurred on more than one occasion.

“As far as everyone can tell, this was the highest one-on-one branded interaction known to date that ever took place on Second Life,” said Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “Reaching 15,000 people in exactly the demographic you’re shooting over seven days is sort of hitting the marketing bonanza.”

“A huge proportion of our opening weekend tickets came from advance Internet purchases, and a large number of those people came from interacting on Second Life,” he said. “We had more than 15,000 one-on-one unique interactions on Second Life, and we captured over 15,000 avatar names. Those people virtually became walking billboards,” he said, referring to the fact that whenever an avatar put on the virtual 3-D glasses, the “Potter” Imax cube appeared, spreading the viral campaign. Source: ‘Phoenix’ soars into Second Life, Virtual avatars credited with boosting film’s Imax 3D showing

These guys sound like they know how to market in Second Life, unlike most of the businesses who are leaving, who just built a sim and expected loads of people to show up. They took the message to the people and made them part of the conversation, a great idea. Imax also opened an office on This Second’s Island where you can get free promotional items for upcoming movies.

Be sure to check out the Harry Potter Sim at the Wizards Alley.

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