Pundits, blogs, magazines, conferences - lately it seems like everyone with one eye on the media and another on the future is compelled to namecheck Second Life. While only time will tell if the media hailstorm is warranted, recent advances by two of the world's largest global networks are making it increasingly difficult for the ad world to tune out the chatter.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: more a social phenomenon than a game, Second Life is a 3D online virtual world where users live, work, play and interact. Boasting over a million unique inhabitants occupying a finite amount of virtual terrain, it functions as a social playground for users the world over. As in First Life, what you get out of it depends largely on how much you're willing to invest; the most experienced users have jobs, relationships, social lives and carefully manicured wardrobes and living spaces. Ballasted by a scripting tool that allows users to design their own goods and endlessly tweak their appearances, Second Life's catalogue of options is limitless. As a result, it has also spawned its own robust currency (Linden dollars) and economy, where users exchange everything from land to sex to furniture. According to a recent article by Popular Science, Second Life's current GDP is equivalent to $64 million US; should it continue at its current rate of growth, it will begin to top the GDPs of actual countries by the springtime.

But beyond the moneymaking and branding opportunities it represents, Second Life is, first and foremost, a powerful social networking tool. It's for that reason that Leo Burnett and BBH recently announced the launch of mirror agencies within the environment. Both have purchased a considerable portion of 'land' on the Second Life grid and are in the process of constructing and refining buildings that will serve as the virtual homebase for their respective networks worldwide.

For Leo Burnett CCO Mark Tutssel, the technology offers a compelling way to unify the network's 2,400 creatives, who work out of 94 offices across 83 different countries. "If we can bring [our employees'] individuality to a place where we can all feed off each other and put ideas front and center, it's going to be a phenomenal breeding ground for creatives and more importantly, for ideas," he says. "Ultimately our currency is not money, it's ideas. This is a great chance for all of us to come together, maximize that and bring together something you can't create in the real world."

Architected by London's Rivers Run Red, BBH's virtual outpost was constructed to "reflect the best parts of all the BBH offices worldwide." While director of content Mark Boyd admits that how the agency uses the space will be dictated by the ideas that emerge from it, he adds it's already becoming a place for inter-continental convergence. "You can wander around, you can chat to people, there's work up on the wall, and increasingly there's going to be speeches and recordings of events that happened in the past two weeks, so you can play some of what you missed," he says. "What we're seeing, as we did last week when we had about 40 people from agencies around the world, is that it's becoming a digital meeting place for creative people."

While BBH and Leo Burnett are, at present, most interested in using Second Life as network meeting hubs, both have their eyes on the larger picture as well. Between getting clients involved and finding ways to monetize the space, there's no shortage of opportunities ahead. Once Leo Burnett's virtual space is complete and the entire agency is acclimated to being online, Tutssel has no doubt those ideas will start to take form. In fact, he's seeing them already. "My email box is full of ideas from people who are constantly having another great thought on how they can adapt and utilize this space," he says. "It's a phenomenal source of energy for the company, and ideas are literally spreading like wildfire and becoming more powerful as they're shared."

A longtime Second Life-r, Boyd is confident the phenomenon also lends itself well to brand integration. After all, he says, SL is all about differentiating yourself, and brands can help with that process. Tellingly, one BBH client has already entered the fray. "Vodafone has won the race to become the world's first virtual mobile network," he says. "You're going to be able to send messages from your first life into your second life and vice versa." As if that weren't dizzying enough, Boyd reveals that the agency has another reality-bending trick up its sleeve. "We're going to set up a camera in the [London] office on top of a screen so that you can look from the agency as if it's a window in Second Life, but equally, it will work in Second Life back out."

As for Boyd's response to those who think all the hype is unwarranted? "Our caveat is that it's not the future, but this new kind of behavior is part of the future, and that's what we're keen to chat about," he says. No doubt it'll provide a framework for a new set of ideas, not to mention a chance to do some, er, aesthetic fine tuning, something not even Tutssel can resist. Deadpans the CCO: "I'm going to look more like Richard Gere."

Second Life http://www.secondlife.com
BBH http://www.bbh.co.uk
Leo Burnett http://www.leoburnett.com