Yes, the Metaverse Can Actually Solve Business Problems

By now, you are most likely familiar - perhaps even inundated - with terms like metaverse, web3 or NFT. But do you or I truly understand their meaning and, more important for our industry, how - if at all - they can aid in business and help overcome challenges? 

 

According to Elav Horwitz and Mathieu Albrand, SVP global innovation & creative partnerships director and senior global innovation strategist, respectively, at McCann Worldgroup, all of these can indeed impact your brand and business goals in the near term - and this Thursday 17th March at 9:00-9:30am EST, they are hosting an MW Presents webinar to give you actionable ideas to do exactly that.

 

“Marketers are being inundated with content about the metaverse and it can be very confusing,” they tell us. Instead of explaining every nuance of the metaverse, they will use the webinar to cut through the noise and show brands how they can tackle four key business challenges in the metaverse: brand purpose marketing, loyalty at scale, driving revenue, and keeping pace with the speed of culture. “We will provide very practical advice: both real-life examples of what brands are doing and even what questions a marketer should ask their agency to solve when they brief the agency team.”

 

Elav and Mathieu say that the session will help agencies because they will provide a very intuitive framework for how to solve core marketing problems. For example, the challenge of building loyalty has always been a concern for marketers. “We will show how social tokens, NFTs and metaverse experiences are simply new technological tools for driving ongoing engagement. Since community is foundational to the make-up of the metaverse, loyalty building is an obvious opportunity area for marketers to harness. For agencies, they will see examples of work that would help brands achieve this goal of building loyalty and the types of KPIs they can help their clients achieve.”

 

The pair believe that it’s important for both brands and agencies to already be at least experimenting with the metaverse and its capabilities, feeling confident to say that engagement with more sophisticated, immersive metaverse experiences and blockchain technology will have longevity. After all, gaming and augmented reality has an ever-increasing stronghold in culture and on consumer behaviour - the blockchain is proving a way for people to interact digitally with greater security and autonomy. “The winners in this space will be those who have the greatest knowledge and understanding, so it is incumbent on brands to get their feet wet and begin learning,” they say. “The metaverse will be an additional, crucial piece of the marketer’s toolkit, much in the way social became table stakes once Web2 took hold.”

 

Getting started in this space is somewhat of a chicken or egg challenge, according to Elav and Mathieu. Brands can start first with understanding their meaningful role in the world so they can create meaning in the metaverse that is appropriate for their brand. Once they define which marketing objective they want to achieve and their meaningful role in this particular area, Elav and Mathieu say that a brand should be able to hone in one or two tactics to test and learn from. “Instead of focusing on hitting a marketing metric, the marketer should focus on what it is they want to learn from the metaverse experience they create. Furthermore, we recommend that companies should meet with platforms and creators, in order to understand the power of the metaverse (or any other technology space), and that would also help shape a better and more meaningful activation and presence.”

 

To educate themselves, Elav and Mathieu’s teams at McCann are engaging in Discord communities, spending time in Decentraland and Sandbox, following the crypto leaders on Twitter, taking courses on minting NFTs with artist communities, and building a network of experts and partners who are doing things we think will interest brands. The agency network also has a strong history of designing and building virtual branded characters, influencers, experiences and games which they believe contributes to their knowledge. They also have a couple of “very exciting activations” coming up that will be public in the next few weeks, and these will obviously provide opportunities for learning and continued experimentation.

 

“We think it’s easy for people to get sour about new technologies,” they say. “We always remind ourselves of two things: 1) that every new technology or innovation faces an initial stage of heavy resistance and that’s ok; and 2) technologies can be used for both good and evil. Once you can get comfortable with those two things, it becomes a lot of fun to explore these new worlds.”

 

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