A couple weeks ago, Viacom ousted CEO Tom Freston, in part over his failure to lasso MySpace. Today, the New York Times is running two separate articles on Viacom companies incorporating online communities. MTV is launching Virtual Laguna Beach, a virtual world based on “the real OC.” Meanwhile, another writer tackles Nickelodeon’s social network for parents, ParentsConnect.com, which is currently in beta and expected to be launched in January.
MTV is using Makena Technologies to build Virtual Laguna Beach as well as a forthcoming a virtual nightclub (like what Doppelganger was trying to do), and a user-designed gay and lesbian virtual world. ParentsConnect was apparently built in-house.
[Cyma Zarghami, president of Nickelodeon Television] Zarghami acknowledged a mandate to grow through acquisition, but she said that Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s new chief executive, and Thomas E. Dooley, his deputy, “have said you definitely want to build and buy, it’s not just buying.”
Interestingly, Nickelodeon is not yet attaching its name to ParentsConnect. It seems Viacom is as skeptical as we are about its ability to tie its media brand to an online community.
In the MTV story, the guy in charge of the projects admits that he masochistically agreed to the project because he found it scary. Accordingly, most of the quotes are pretty grimace-worthy:
During a demonstration last week at MTV, [Matt Bostwick, an MTV senior vice president] played the role of an avatar named Violet Jade whom he configured — scrolling through an extensive menu of eye shapes, hair colors, skin tones and so on — to look like a typical character on the show: blond, tan and scantily clad.
Getting to play the part of a hot teenager does seem to fit the aspirational nature of Laguna Beach…but we’re not so sure we’d want to run the chance of bumping into some MTV exec in his board shorts!
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