Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was going to be a meta platform and part of the Facebook Metaverse, a question has been spreading like wildfire in the digital marketing community - “How is the Metaverse going to affect digital marketing?”.

This is an important question because Facebook, one of the largest marketing platforms on the planet, took in ₹9,326 crores in advertising income from India alone which was a 41% jump from the previous year. It stands to reason that the only reason why a company would be willing to gamble on such a gargantuan scale would be to revolutionise their company.

If all goes as per Mark’s plan, Metaverse technology is probably going to change the internet as we know it. Today, we at Idecution are going to show you why that is so.

Understanding the Metaverse

Marketing has always been a field that has adopted new technologies to revolutionise the way it works.

In the beginning, there were billboards. We then moved to radios followed by TVs. This was followed by the age of the internet which gave birth to Digital Marketing wherein you could advertise on search engine results (through SEM and SEO), social media platforms, streaming platforms etc. in the form of text ads, image ads, video ads etc.

The Metaverse is simply a virtual platform that enables you to live your life, as you do every day, in a virtual manner by making use of an “avatar”. If this sounds similar to a social media platform, it is because the basic tenets are the same. The Metaverse however takes the experience to a whole new level. It actually creates a whole new virtual world where you can, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, form communities and grow businesses.

If you want a more simplistic definition of the Metaverse, then take the example of open-world Metaverse games such as Red Dead Redemption, Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls saga, etc. In these Metaverse games, you are playing as a virtual avatar in a world created by programmers and the anime Sword Art Online (SAO) based on the manga with the same name, perfectly depicts what the virtual world will look like and feel like and expands on that. The worlds created are so complex with so many different choices that it might feel like the real world except that it is still happening on a coded platform. The Metaverse is going to be just like that except it is going to be infinitely more complex because of infinitely more choices and actions that are available to the users.

This concept needs to be clearly understood because marketing is a field where “survival of the fittest” is especially true. With the growing number of Gen Z users who have grown up using Augmented reality devices, anything outside the Metaverse may soon become a desolate wasteland for outdated brands.

Now that its importance is clear, it is necessary to experience first-hand what this platform is in order to fully understand how marketing can be done on it. In order to get a taste of it you need to do the following:

1. Purchase an Oculus headset

2. Set up an Oculus account on the Meta Quest website

3. Sign up for Facebook Horizon

4. Create an avatar on the Oculus Platform

This will let you “live” in the Metaverse and get a feel of what lies in store.

How will advertising be done in the Metaverse?

Before we get to this, you need to understand the anticipation and the hype surrounding the Metaverse. According to Google Trends, the number of users searching for “Metaverse” has been increasing exponentially and even crossed the 100 Million mark in August 2021. This shows it is not going to be hard to get leads through this platform, provided you employ the right kind of marketing strategy.

Even though there is much to know about the Metaverse, there are a few things we already know about how we can market in the Metaverse.

The Metaverse is going to be vastly different to a social media platform where a user is targeted based on demographics, interests, location etc. and the user is presented with a banner ad/carousel ad/video ad etc. in order to redirect him. This is not going to be the case in the Metaverse. The user journey will actually be very similar to real-life wherein you might be a fan of an actor or celebrity and then you find out that they are a fan of an apparel company. And suddenly you are interested in the apparel company but not because the apparel company is interrupting your newsfeed. The organic user journey is a critical part of the Metaverse experience.

Early forays into the Metaverse

Advertising can be done in ways like never before wherein events like fashion shows or sporting events can be hosted in a virtual manner to advertise products.

1. Recently the fashion house of Gucci partnered with a Metaverse company called Roblox to sell several collectables online using Non-fungible tokens (Metaverse NFTs) which users of games like EA Sports FIFA, PUBG Battlegrounds will be very well aware of. The user doesn’t actually buy them using money but they can buy tokens to use for buying things that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible to them. This allowed Gucci to sell 286,000,000 Robux on Roblox which translates to roughly 3.5 million USD in real-life money.

2. Another example is the product placement available in sporting events like a football match. There are various billboards in a real-life football stadium advertising various products and services. The same can be done in the Metaverse where product placement can be done in this virtual football match by using companies such as Bidstack who are currently running ads on popular football platforms such as Football Manager, EA Sports FIFA, Konami PES Soccer etc. where the user is shown the product in a non-intrusive manner while playing the game.

3. Snapchat has also been getting into the Metaverse as well with its introduction of “Spectacles: The Next Generation”. This feature allows users to create an avatar and change its appearance through the modification of various wardrobes. This has been, as expected, immensely popular among users below the age of 25.

4. Fast-food chain Wendy’s used Metaverse marketing to its advantage as the company used an avatar to advertise their “never before frozen” beef products using the in-game restaurant by having their character destroy all the frozen beef. This led to a 119% increase in mentions for the product across all social media platforms.

5. Last but not least, one of the biggest corporations in the world, Coca-Cola raised $575,000 by auctioning off limited-time-only Metaverse NFTs on an NFT platform called OpenSea. This contained various virtual collectables which can be worn in meta platforms such as Decentraland 3D.

6. Massive Interactive Live Events (MILEs) are expected to become the whole new ball game. As the name suggests, they are virtual events like in the case of Gucci that has not only been co-opted by MNCs such as Unilever and Balenciaga but also has been done on a much larger scale by the Tourism department of New Zealand. To promote tourism, users were allowed to walk through famous tourist attractions in New Zealand during the pandemic in a virtual manner. This was done in order to create a bond between the user and the location so that once the pandemic subsides, the user can visit the location to fully experience it.

These are just a few examples of marketing in the Metaverse. With the arrival of 5G technology and appliances like VR, Oculus etc. Metaverse marketing is surely going to be dynamic, user friendly and a veritable gold mine for brands around the world.

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Disclaimer:
The trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Idecution Marketing Studio LLP does not claim any intellectual copyright over or intend to use it for any commercial purposes whatsoever. This blog is only meant to provide information to the digital marketing community.