The metaverse is the next generation of the Internet
Creative Technology Director, Martin Pagh Ludvigsen
With so many forms of digital media, and new ones always on the horizon, how do you determine which way of pushing content is the most viable?
The arrival of the metaverse is one of the most interesting things to ever happen to digital media. However, when it comes to deciding where to push content, the best technology doesn’t always win. The winner is often the platform with the best content and brand partnerships. This creates an interesting dynamic; the metaverse is still nascent, and if we have a great partnership with one platform, that could be a catalyst for its success. That being said, we still need to audit the technology powering the platform, the user experience, and the legitimacy of the organizations or individuals behind it.
How does the boundless framework of the metaverse make it appealing for brands and marketers to get involved in this new form of media?
The most powerful aspect of the metaverse is that it’s a place where individuals can explore and express their identities. The success of proto-metaverse platforms like Fortnite and Roblox with a heavy focus on avatar customizations is a testament to that. Identity is just as important to a brand as it is to the individual. The metaverse is the next generation of the Internet, and we will help brands find their identity here, just as we did with the previous generations. In these early stages, there is still room to experiment, take risks, even make a few mistakes. A great example was our recent launch of “Acura of Decentraland”, an Acura dealership in the metaverse. Acura is currently creating a new design concept for their real-world dealers. We took inspiration from this design concept and were able to quickly bring it to life virtually, even expand on it because we aren’t restricted by the laws of physics that apply to the real world.
What plans, if any, does your agency have to expand its reach into the metaverse?
As already mentioned, we opened a dealership for Acura in Decentraland. It opened in March 2022, and will stay open to support ongoing and future campaigns for Acura. Beyond that, we
have several active briefs across our brand portfolio, and look forward to helping them launch and expand into the metaverse.
In what ways can the increase in virtual presence lead to more successful campaigns and what would a virtual space allow you to do that traditional media hasn’t?
Short term, there is still a chance to get some firsts in the metaverse. Across the different platforms, consumers are entering a new space, looking for things to do, and not finding many. Being among the first brands to offer those consumers meaningful experiences can help form great relationships between us and them. Long term, we need to work harder to get the attention of the same consumers, as competition increases and the metaverse becomes more crowded. This, however, is one of the most important aspects of this new world: We are not alone in the metaverse. Our brands exist alongside other brands, the stories we tell are interwoven with other stories, the experiences we offer exist alongside other experiences.
How do you anticipate the metaverse shaping new forms of storytelling in advertising?
In the early stages of the metaverse, we took a lot of lessons from gaming. Online multiuser gaming has existed for decades, and we have drawn on that experience to create stories in the metaverse. The most important and useful mechanism for storytelling in the metaverse is the quest. We ask a user or a group of users to perform a series of tasks, and offer them some kind of reward for doing that. Along the way, we get to tell the story of the brand, and if we do that right and give the user a great experience, they will associate our brand with that. Even if they don’t remember exactly what we told them, they will remember how we made them feel.
Given the interactive nature of these virtual spaces, how do you see this affecting the way consumers consume and engage with advertisements?
We’ve done consumer research internally and we’ve found that consumers are willing to accept the presence of brands and advertising in the metaverse as long as it’s done in a respectful, inclusive, and nondisruptive way. An interactive experience requires active participation by the consumer, and they’re unlikely to be willing to participate if we interrupt them when they’re trying to do something else. With that in mind, and knowing that the number of users actively using various metaverse platforms is still limited, we will have to accept having a limited reach, at least for a while. This means we have to look at different quantitative measures of success, such as
length of engagement, heat maps of where people go in our experiences, and percentage of users who complete our quests. Another wonderful thing we’ve seen happen is the number of users creating their own content in our spaces and sharing it with their networks. We’ve had about a dozen f visitors to “Acura of Decentraland” create long, detailed walk-through videos of our space and share them on YouTube, and that’s not something we’re used to seeing with traditional media.