Marketing in the Metaverse
No one should be surprised by the recent ‘Meta’ hype.
If you have followed Facebook for a while this has always been a stated goal for the company since at least 2016. I covered elements of this - and the opportunities the Metaverse may have for marketers - in my 2017 book on native advertising.
The Below is an Extract from the closing chapter of my book, Native Advertising: The Essential Guide, published by Kogan Page.
Imagine if you had told a marketer back in 1984 that in the future they’d be able to write an advertising message, or piece of content and share it - at the click of just a few buttons - with an audience of potentially millions, who could read, share, visit and buy your products from a hand held phone.
And in order to do this you would not have to leave your desk, or even speak to anyone else. You could do it all from your computer. Instantly. You’d be naturally greeted with disbelief. Fast forward a couple of decades or so from now and think the inconceivable.
By 2030 – or even sooner – marketers will have immersive generating tools at their fingertips that we can only dream of today.
Social networks – and the feed as a whole – will become gateways to immersive new worlds that we’ll continually dip in and out of. A lot of these tools will likely sit within social network ‘walled gardens’; but there will undoubtedly be independent tools, too.
Marketing strategies will focus on how to ‘invite’ audiences into these worlds via the feed. Immersion and brand messaging will increasingly take place inside these brand created, or brand hosted, worlds.
In the future, VR will enable even more types of connection — like the ability for friends who live in different parts of the world to spend time together and feel like they’re really there with each other.
THE VR BRAND ENVIRONMENT OF THE FUTURE
Imagine these connections with friends and family happening in an environment that was created by a brand. Friends living in far flung countries meeting up in a virtual ‘bar room’, ‘hosted’ by Heineken or Budweiser, for example, to watch the latest football match; a family reunion in a cosy living room created by Nestle, Unilever or Procter & Gamble; or a group of friends partying to the latest Rihanna concert within a Sony, Nike, or Red Bull themed environment.
It would all feel very real. The emotion, the connection, the memories will be real. The immersive interaction with a brand full on.
Within these VR rooms AI would be used to crunch the data that these virtual world conversations and interactions create in real-time; giving brands invaluable data points that they can use to add to the conversation; subtly, and in ways we can only just imagine. It wouldn’t be the hard sell, more like a friend recommending something to you as it comes up in conversation.
Lets take the football example and run with it. We have a group of old school friends from London, now flung across the world living in Singapore, Japan, India, Australia and the US. They are big football fans and they decide to come together and meet up for the latest Arsenal vs Chelsea football match.
The game starts, conversation flows. It becomes quickly obvious to anyone involved – including the AI monitoring the chat – that the group are all Arsenal fans.
A simple tactic, at half time, then, would mean that instead of showing generic ads on the screen, the ads would be far more targeted towards the audience – not just towards Arsenal fans, but Arsenal fans that live in Singapore, Japan, India, Australia and the US, as well as hundreds of other data points accessible to the platform in order to identify the likes, dislikes, needs and desires of each person. Each of them will see a different set of adverts, depending on their own data.
So far, so similar to modern targeting in digital. But in an immersive brand world you can do much, much more. What if, as part of the immersive room the beer brand have created they had an entire ‘back catalogue’ of ex-Arsenal players – every squad member still alive since 1990, for example, watching the game, too.
The role of these ex-players is to ‘float’ around the numerous immersive rooms, popping in to watch some of the game alongside this group of mates. So when the second half kicks off Ian Wright, Thierry Henry or Dennis Bergkamp, are there too, just popping in to the ‘bar room’ to says hello and ‘shake hands’ with everyone.
The group are completely immersed: they’ve all just met one of their heroes. It’s a great story they are going to share with their mates again and again. You know where they are going to watch the next game, too, don’t you?
Who made that possible for them? The brand of course. Now that’s immersion. That’s building a brand narrative in a unique and extraordinary way. That’s the fusion of creativity, technology, data and ideas to tell a story – not a spoon fed story created by the brand for consumer’s to passively consume – but rather creating an environment and opportunity – for your target audience to create their own positive stories in a brand environment.
This is just one kind of example of the future of digital advertising experience we are likely to see as AI, VR and AR develop and become permanent fixtures in our daily lives and the toolkits of marketers the world over. It will be a new form of media, yes, but native advertising – in a new carnation – will form much of the advertising model underpinning it.
This is an extract from the closing chapter from Native Advertising: The Essential Guide, published by Kogan Page.
Past Issues:
Issue 1:The Soup is Getting Cold with Martin Lindstrom, best-selling author, brand expert and TIME magazine’s one of the “world’s 100 most influential people.”
Issue 2: The Soup is Getting Cold with Nick Entwistle, the founder and Creative Director of The Bank of Creativity and One Minute Briefs, a social media phenomenon.
Issue 3: The Soup is Getting Cold with Alon Shtruzman, Hollywood TV producer and CEO of Keshet International, Keshet Media Group's global distribution and production arm.
Issue 4: The Soup is Getting Cold with Sheree Atcheson, Sri Lankan-born Irish computer scientist and world expert on diversity and inclusion, as well as the author of Demanding More, a Financial Times business summer books of 2021 choice.
Issue 5: The Soup is Getting Cold with Justin Calderón, a Barcelona based journalist whose work appeared on the BBC, Foreign Policy, CNN, Newsweek, The Bangkok Post and more, on his new life as a digital content marketer.
Issue 6: The Soup is Getting Cold with Angelica Malin, award-winning entrepreneur, podcast and event host based in London and the author of She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age.