Shaping user perception, then, is an important part of what Gaia Online does during a branded campaign. It is of course beneficial to the advertiser, but it's also important to making the branded experiences feel like an inviting activity in Gaia rather than something intrusive. If Gaia gold has done its job successfully, then the users value the campaign's branded virtual goods, at least in part, because they valued the campaign.

As far as that goes, it's often the items that tie themselves most closely to the Gaia gold experience that end up becoming the greatest long-term successes, like the speed-boosting Nike shirt or a virtual cannonball promoting a Pirates of the Caribbean theme. The cannonball could be thrown at other users or the screen, giving it an obvious role to fill in Gaia's social interactions. The only items that really don't work are the ones that fail to have a sense of the playfulness particular to a virtual world.

"Sony's done maybe half a dozen movies with us, and the last few have been dramatically bigger than the first few because they've come to understand how Gaia works," said Hyrkin. "A great one was You Don't Mess With the Zohan, where they wanted to do a t-shirt, so we did something else, a cool hair dryer item. They saw the hair dryer did better than the t-shirt and they realized that more interactive and exciting items have more value."

Hyrkin describes Gaia as having done 60 to 70 branded campaign over the past two years. Gaia's first campaign was to promote The Last Mimzy film, conducted in cooperation with the Deep Focus marketing agency firm. Now the company goes back to Gaia Online Gold with promotions about once a year.

Deep Focus spent some time in Gaia gold, observing the way users interacted and getting a feel for the nature of the community. What they noticed very quickly is that most interactions and conversations were taking place with Gaia's virtual goods as a central focus. As it happened, The Last Mimzy was a film that suggested immediate ideas for a virtual good tie-in.

"The great thing is that the Mimzy in the title of the film was a plush rabbit, so that made it perfect. You could almost see the characters in this virtual world carrying the plush rabbit around the way the characters did in the film," said Deep Focus CEO Ian Shaffer. "A light went on, we thought if we did a limited edition virtual good and created a secondary market for it, not only would the conversation go on around the launch of this virtual good but once the initial availability passed there would be conversations about how to obtain it."