Early adopters in fashion and entertainment are blazing a trail, but how could brands in other sectors embrace the potential of the metaverse?
31 January 2023
For those who have grown up with a parallel digital existence exploring, playing, and socialising in open-ended worlds such as Fortnite, Roblox or Minecraft, it may not be a huge jump to imagine a future where interactions of all kinds take place in a virtual universe.
Fashion and entertainment brands have been particularly quick to seize the opportunity to create immersive experiences in the metaverse. A recent campaign by Spanish clothing brand Pull&Bear enabled customers to try on the latest collections in VR while enjoying a range of activities on a virtual island, including surfing.
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By Albert Abello Lozano, head of automation, Treatwell
How the metaverse could transform brand engagement
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Michael Inpong: The number one rule for personalisation is delighting the customer. And part of delighting them is answering their desire for privacy. ■
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Brands such as Coca-Cola and Nike have already explored the digital scarcity that NFTs unlock to produce and sell limited-edition digital merchandise to their communities. “NFTs are the next generation of membership,” says R/GA’s Nick Pringle. “You can get closer, own part of a brand, and impact where it’s going. It’s not just a consumption relationship, but active participation. Storytelling on steroids.”
“Fashion and luxury brands help signal to others who you are,” adds Matthieu Nouzareth, US CEO at The Sandbox, a virtual world that has played host to high-end fashion brands such as Gucci, including an experimental concept store called Gucci Vault Land. Those first exploring the metaverse may not be precious about their avatar’s appearance, but Nouzareth believes that, in time, there’ll be an urge to refine it to express your personality. “People want to show off, flex, send a signal,” he explains. “You might buy a digital bag, for instance, or digital sneakers.”
In early July, Julian Bass, a 20-year-old theatre student at George State University, posted a TikTok video (below) that you could quite safely say broke the internet. Set to Harry Styles’ song ‘Watermelon Sugar’, Bass transforms into a Star Wars Jedi Knight, complete with a lightsaber, before morphing into Cartoon Network’s watch-wielding Ben 10 and finally becoming Spiderman, shooting webs from his wrists. He cross-posted the video from TikTok to Twitter, asking followers to retweet it to get him in front of Disney.
Unsurprisingly, the impressive clip – and his request – snowballed, gaining 5 million views and 1.1 million likes on TikTok. Industry heavyweights like director James Gunn and Walt Disney’s executive chairman responded, while Andy Samberg’s comedy trio The Lonely Island forwarded it to VFX studio Industrial Light and Magic. Bass says several Hollywood figures reached out to him privately to discuss his future. Bass’s clip is a perfect example of how the short-form video entertainment platform’s selection of creative tools can be used to reach huge audiences and create content that’s so powerful it’s shared across all the major social platforms.
TikTok’s in-app creative toolkit takes content to the next level
In the fifth part of our partner content series, which will explore the enhanced creative capabilities available within the TikTok app, we look at how Creators are harnessing the power of its toolbox and why brands don’t need to be editing experts to get involved – and go viral.
Safe and supportive digital environments where people can express themselves authentically are hugely valuable – and brands can play a role in curating those spaces. For instance, True Self World is a Meta Horizons World experience that Mastercard built with creators @Skitter and @RhondaX. “It’s inspired by Mastercard’s True Name Card feature, which enables trans and non-binary people to use their chosen name on their payment cards,” explains Timms. “That’s so important to people who are transitioning: many will refer to their birth name as their ‘dead name’. In True Self World, queer communities enjoy the simple pleasure of being themselves.”
As consumers design and refine their digital appearance, brands are also well-placed to provide everything from custom avatar skins to collectable items – a potential revenue stream as well as a brand-boosting exercise. Our choice of clothing and accessories is a fundamental part of how we express our identity externally, and this is as true in the metaverse as it is IRL.
The metaverse may still be in its infancy, but technology is advancing apace, with VR headsets such as the Meta Quest 2 making fully immersive metaverse-style experiences increasingly accessible and affordable for consumers.
"Ultimately, the metaverse will become what digital is today: invisible," suggests Nick Pringle, SVP Executive Creative Director at global digital innovation and marketing agency R/GA. "We don't see digital anymore; it's just life. It will become a normal way to interact with brands, with friends, and with culture. And over the next 10 to 20 years, the tech will disappear, and you'll move effortlessly between digital and physical."
Even if the time is not yet be right for your brand to dive headfirst into the metaverse, putting in the groundwork now to understand its potential – and consider the right angle of approach in the future – is time well spent for marketers.
“No matter which sector you operate in, the metaverse will be nothing short of a revolution,” predicts Meta’s Carrie Timms. “It will fundamentally transform how customers interact with your brand. Whatever your industry, the metaverse adds a whole new dimension of connection, and that’s exciting – not just for businesses, but for people.” ■
Trading digital merchandise in virtual worlds may seem a far-distant vision for brands skewed towards older consumers – or perhaps not on the roadmap at all. But there’s plenty of potential for different sectors to engage with NFTs in ways that feel relevant and accessible to their respective audiences.
“Twinning a product could be really interesting,” suggests Pringle at R/GA. “Say, you buy an energy drink in the real world – it could become a jetpack in a virtual world. It’s about that fluidity between dimensions.” Other products may have less obvious links to a digital counterpart, but the onus is on marketers to think creatively about how the metaverse can augment the real world with valuable, relevant, and engaging brand experiences.“
People may not buy virtual tomatoes to eat, but they may engage with what farmers are doing to produce the real-life version in a sustainable way,” suggests Max Vedel, co-founder and creative director at metaverse-focused agency Swipe Back. “And you’ll likely never smell a virtual perfume, but an abstract musical artistic experience could play with a user’s senses and take them on a journey through its flavour.”
Enriching cross-platform experiences
The metaverse can also add enormous value to areas such as healthcare. Complex surgical procedures can be observed, and practiced, through virtual experiences regardless of physical location – and access can be provided to even the most inaccessible of places.
For consumers, the metaverse can also unlock accessibility to healthcare and wellbeing initiatives. For instance, SafeSpace – a project run by the Royal Marsden Hospital with funding from Macmillan Cancer Support – tested the use of VR to support people’s wellbeing during cancer treatment, transporting patients to lakesides or mountaintops with real-time animation.
“Like the real world, places in the metaverse can have healing properties. But unlike the real world, we can access them from anywhere,” explains Alex Fenton, strategist at DNCO. “So much of the discourse around the metaverse focuses on the detrimental impact on our health and wellbeing, but we’ve barely scratched the surface on how it can make us feel better.”
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Boosting health and wellbeing
Caption: Metaverse-focused agency Swipe Back put its avatar design skills to the test by creating virtual influencer ‘Cinder’, a queer gamer on a journey of self-discovery
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While youth-focused brands like Pull&Bear are several steps ahead in this space, such digital interactivity could become standard practice for everyone in a couple of decades.
“For younger generations, individuality and identity is critical. The metaverse is a new way to express that,” explains Nick Pringle, SVP and executive creative director at R/GA. “And the younger cohort will teach everyone else, just as my generation taught phones and social media to our parents.”
For brands across all sectors, this brings new opportunities to engage and delight audiences – regardless of demographic. “Test-driving cars from the comfort of your home could be a game-changer for car dealers,” says Carrie Timms, director of global business marketing EMEA at Meta. “The same principle applies to common in-store interactions such as testing out sports equipment. And in education, the metaverse is poised to solve persistent issues like lack of access to libraries. Imagine students studying the consequences of climate change with a virtual class trip to the North Pole.”
As the metaverse develops and technology becomes more powerful and accessible, brand experiences will be limited only by their creators’ imagination. But in typically conservative fields such as financial services, immersive worlds that are surreal or overly playful will likely feel inappropriate and distracting. “Banking is so based on trust,” Pringle points out. “I don’t want to talk to a giant horse to do it.”
With the right treatment, however, even everyday banking transactions could be revolutionised by the metaverse, just as we’ve seen our day-to-day financial management transformed by digitisation in the past decade.
High-street branches are rarely part of our daily banking experience now, so brands must think beyond recreating physical spaces in the metaverse. “In 20 years, we won’t be standing in virtual bank lobbies,” says Isabel Perry, VP of Web3 at Dept. “It’ll be an extraordinary experience, rooted in your crypto wallet, with smart notifications. Possibly a chat bot, but more boutique, so it feels very human even though it’s utterly inhuman.”
Augmenting the everyday
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