14 DAY TRIAL // Multimedia giant Disney has announced that it will launch a massive online advertising campaign linked to safety in online virtual worlds, after its Club Penguin title was linked to breaches in security, allowing children to interact with a number of convicted sex offenders.
Disney has said that it will be spending 4.7 million dollars (3.79 million Euro) on the campaign, which will include ads on television, on websites, on the official Club Penguin outlets and in the other virtual worlds that the company is working on.
The targeted audience includes no less than 100 million children and their parents in territories from Europe to the Middle East and Africa.
During June Sulake, the developer that is working on the day-to-day operation of Club Penguin, needed to eliminate chat from the virtual world temporarily after it was accused that a number of known sex offenders were able to use it in order to contact children.
Lane Merrifield, who is the executive vice president in charge of the Disney Online Studios and one of the founders of Club Penguin, stated during the Children's Media Conference that protecting its target audience was one of the most important tasks for the company and that educating them was a good way of accomplishing the goal.
The executive stated, “Building trust with parents means not simply marketing safety, but actually achieving it. I truly believe that self-regulation can work, but as an industry we need to be clear and accountable for the standards that we set ourselves.”
Virtual worlds aimed at kids have been a success for a number of companies in recent years, but the genre has also seen at least one spectacular failure, the LEGO-based MMO Universe.
The biggest coming launch linked to it is the Funcom-made LEGO virtual world that is set to arrive during 2013.