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WhyRobbieRocks
Virtual Society for Fashion Addicts
Two years ago, Cindy Dekkers set up the interactive entertainment company RobbieNetworks, together with her two partners. She wanted to use her creativity more fully, and discover whether there was a market in the Netherlands for her idea. Since then, the virtual fashion world Whyrobbierocks.com numbers over 150,000 members, young people between 14 and 24 years of age. Right now, they are still mainly from the Netherlands, but that will change rapidly if Cindy has anything to do with it.
So how does it work? At Whyrobbierocks.com, you can dress up a top-to-bottom personally styled figure, also called an avatar. With so-called Robbie credits, you can buy clothes and accessories, with over 5,000 different items to choose from. If you are happy with the way you look, you can save your alter ego and use it for all your online communication. It becomes a personal PR platform. Change your clothes, or even design your own clothes, create your own shop, and then wait for the votes and comments from others.
Avatars, fashion . . . it may sound like pure fun, but Cindy has a serious mission with WhyRobbieRocks: to develop the creativity of young people with an enjoyable, sociable, non-violent concept. She is setting up a fashion design contest together with MySpace, for example. With a design tool, users will make their own designs, which others can then vote on. The winners will be helped to make their collections for real, taking them onto the catwalk to compete against each other for the top prize.
WhyRobbieRocks offers advertisers the chance to reach a young target group in a different way, namely with in-game advertising. Brands can be built into the game in a way that is useful to members. So the Rabobank looks after the virtual economy, for example. It also has its own chatbot, a Rabobank character who can chat with the target group. O'Neill put its newest collection online, so members can choose to try items on. This gives O'Neill information about which items are most popular. Cindy has learned from experience that avatars don’t actually act very differently online than they do in real life. O'Neill subsequently pays on the basis of the number of impressions.
Cindy Dekkers
Co-Owner, RobbieNetworks
Most proud of:
My alter ego!
Dream job:
To become the international avatar supplier for all the social communities of MySpace, Google and Yahoo, for example, so that everyone uses Robbie for their online communication.
Biggest opportunity for the creative industries:
Organise export possibilities using the Internet, with virtual workshops and assistants, so that creatives can get their concepts rapidly realised internationally.