Metaverse is a term we’ve been encountering a lot on social media lately. Let’s first look at what this virtual universe means, which will affect many sectors in the near future, perhaps even ending it.
Metaverse refers to a virtual world that we are very familiar with from games and movies before. Metaverse, also called the new generation of the internet, is a technology where we can be anyone we want outside our own universe, travel the world without leaving our home, and even make a virtual time travel. You can find more detailed information about Metaverse in the video below.
How will Metaverse affect brands?
This virtual universe, which sees the new generation as the target audience, will affect many sectors in the near future. The advertising industry is one of them. Metaverse, which is a completely digital and virtual universe, also has many new advertising spaces.
The B2C interactions that the metastore will enable are already happening with Bitmojis, personalized emoji avatars on Snapchat. Levis and Ralph Lauren are two brands that have launched a range of virtual outfits for Bitmojis that people can also buy in real life. It is speculated that in the future, Snapchat’s Bitmojis will also integrate with VR and AR experiments.
Selling products to avatars for brands will open up a great line of business. There are many brands that are already taking action for such collaborations. Gucci is one of them. Recently, at the Gucci Garden event in Roblox, an online game that is very convenient for the Metaverse universe, Gucci sold Gucci branded products to players that they can use in-game.
That being the case, the ultimate goal of brands will be to build their own metaverse. Earlier this year, Japanese beauty company SK-II created SK-II CITY, a virtual city modeled after Tokyo and allowing people to explore and experience the digital environment.
Similarly, sneaker app Aglet has created the “sneakerverse,” a Metaverse that combines sneakers, games, and shopping. Interestingly, Aglet 1, the platform’s virtual sneaker, has become so popular with gamers that the company is now about to go into production in real life.
How will Metaverse affect advertising?
For advertisers and agencies, Metaverse is already starting to provide a host of new opportunities to promote products, services and brands. The most obvious of these opportunities is to take advantage of ad spaces in the Metaverse, just as you would in the real world. As the most suitable example of this technique, we can give examples of advertisements in the breaks of Christopher Nolan movies published in the Fortnite game.
Likewise, companies that might want to engage in VR/AR games can choose to recreate virtual versions of real-life items, such as a vending machine with a real-life beverage or a specific car model, to be explored within the Metaverse.
For Metaverse to be usable, brands also need to advertise as naturally as they can. Marketers will need to be mindful of the way they integrate their campaigns into metadata, as the backlash recently showed after Facebook included ads in Oculus Quest games.
What are the brands doing in Metaverse?
In November, NASCAR will launch a multi-year plan to get its brand in front of young gamers on the hugely popular Roblox platform. For starters, NASCAR will drop a digital car into the platform’s groundbreaking Jailbreak game and sell outfits for players’ avatars. Players will also be able to design their own NASCAR uniforms as part of a fan contest, and the game’s developers will act as influencers to promote it on social media. NASCAR’s activation is one of the biggest examples of brands from Chipotle to HBO advertising in what’s known as the “metaverse” to reach new audiences and appeal to consumers accustomed to the digital realms.
The reason for the power of the Metaverse
Warner Bros. Brands like , Hyundai and Gucci have created their own virtual worlds; Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch and Crockpot are stepping into the Metaverse by selling their own NFTs. Sephora, Nike and HBO offer a futuristic experience to their users using Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. Facebook, on the other hand, is so enchanted that the social media giant plans to spend $10 billion over the next five years to become a Metaverse company. The currencies of the metaverse universes are already trading on crypto exchanges.
Accessibility is the biggest reason why companies of this size make such a large investment. Any advertisement in the Metaverse universe can appeal to many more people than any other advertising space. Continuing with the Roblox example, advertising on a virtual platform with more than 200 million monthly active users, half of whom are under the age of 13, is a much more convenient and sensible move than renting billboards in big cities like New York or Istanbul. Millions of people around the world now play hundreds of thousands of games with brand activation.
As a result, it is only a matter of time today that the virtual world we see in many movies and TV series we watch, such as Ready Player One and Sword Art Online, will mix with the real world. It is an undeniable fact that those who can adapt to the Metaverse before anyone else will be very successful in this virtual world.
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