Advertising in the Metaverse: What marketers need to know (暫時只提供英文版本)
Author: LazyKar (Repost)
🔸 Metaverse serves as a good advertising opportunity for brands
🔸 With more users participating and increasing time spent, behaviors in the metaverse are a good topic to justify studying resources
Why advertising in the Metaverse
1. More time spent in the metaverse
Statista’s late 2021 survey of internet users indicates that over half of the respondents would join the metaverse for work possibilities such as virtual workspaces and networking. Brands advertise the budget on where people spend their time. It is certain that brands will follow and advertise in the metaverse to ride on this mass and opportunity.
2. Avoid advertising fatigue
With audiences facing unstoppable and bombarding marketing messages, standing out from the crowd has long become advertisers' and marketers’ biggest challenge. Many brands are striving to find a new way to stand out above the competition and communicate with their customers. The metaverse opens a new platform for advertisers and marketers to reach audiences, especially for younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha who grow up in proto-metaverses.
Recently many brands have started using metaverses’ opportunities to market their products or services. There are some 3D metaverse-like billboards for immersive outdoor advertising. The 3D elements, such as 3D avatars, aim to provide an immersive experience.
3. Unlimited amount of people
The metaverse has no limit to the number of people to join. It means that advertisers can reach an unlimited audience that can enlarge the audience base.
4. Endless possibilities and limitless creativity
With AR/VR technology, the metaverse creates a more immersive and diverse experience to help the brands tell their brand story via advertisement. Without the restraints from the physical world, marketers can conceptualize campaigns in innovative ways. For example, multisensory stimulation can help the users to have a real sense of the products in the metaverse.
Types of Advertisements
1. Virtual events placements
Advertising in the metaverse is similar to a real-world advertisement. We can place billboard ads or signages in the metaverse concerts, summits, sports events, in-game billboards, etc. For example, Some Decentraland billboards situate on key roads and Plazas throughout the Metaverse, very similar to real-world ad placement but with a more creative approach and appearance to draw attention.
To advertise in the metaverse is very similar to the real-world one. We being with researching and observing user behavior. The following are basic questions we should take into consideration:
🔸How many participants come to attend the event?
🔸Will participants stay here for a long time?
🔸How to get participants to click or search the brand after seeing the advertisements?
🔸How to measure the success of an ad campaign?
2. Branded partnership / Event sponsorship
To create metaverse experiences for their community, brands strive to seek partnerships with existing metaverses. Travis Scott, the hip-hop superstar partnered with Epic Games to perform a concert for Fortnite users. According to a Forbes report, grossed roughly $20 million for it including merchandise sales. Tony Hawk and the Sandbox also partnered to create the world’s biggest virtual skatepark in the metaverse. The Sandbox Partners with Warner to create a music-themed virtual world. Gucci also partnered with Roblox to launch a Gucci Garden in its metaverse. Similar to real-world product placements, brands can do product placement in metaverse’s games, events, or concerts.
Final Thoughts
Advertising in the metaverse is a new concept yet at this early stage, everything is experimental with the absence of a guidebook. Like early internet movers, Google in search marketing and Facebook in social media, there are always great opportunities and advantages for first-movers to grab. The early success of in-game and music concert ads in metaverse are both good references for advertisers to study and from there to ride on this new wave of internet advertisement.