What the Metaverse means to influencers & brands … a contrarian’s take ~via the indomitable @JasonFalls
Jason always speaks his mind and that's why I respect him so much. His insights add value to any topical marketing conversation... OR those about bourbon. /Ted
Me, looking in my avatar mirror in my virtual home on Spatial.io. (Image)
As you know, I don’t waste your inbox space by forcing out something based on a deadline. I wanted to wait until I had something worth writing. And here it is:
I just think the Metaverse is like a casino: It looks amazing and shiny from the outside, but once you’re there you realize you can’t hear anything, it smells like cigarette smoke and 75 percent of the people you run into are just creepy.
You’ve heard tell of a guy who got lucky and won $150,000 on a slot machine. But most people leave sad.
Or at least underwhelmed.
Don’t get me wrong. I still go to the casino now and then when I want to pass some time, waste a little money, and have a conversation with someone I’m convinced is a hooker. But it’s not my new jam.
For some, it will be. I have a friend who moved to Vegas out of college and has found a nice life bartending, blackjack dealing, and taking whatever cocktail waitress he suckers into thinking he’s loaded that week to see Celine Dion. And yes, an occasional douchebag will come along and make a killing there doing something we all wish we could do, too.
But I’m not going to recommend that influencers and brands relocate to the Strip and leave their lives behind, either.
Keep in mind I’m almost 50. I also stopped playing video games when 3D graphics turned NHL ‘96, which I dominated, into NHL ‘97, which saw me lose my first game, 11-0. If anyone is apt to be a cranky old bastard about the alleged replacement for social media, it’s me.
But you know that or you wouldn’t subscribe, right?
So in this edition of Influence, I’m just going to give you my honest take on all this Metaverse nonsense. There’s some opportunities there for brands and influencers. But not more than, say, Tuesday nights at Mandalay Bay.
The Difference in Virtual Reality and Reality, only Virtual
The Metaverse is all about experiences. If these new websites, apps and platforms that fall under the category of “Metaverse” didn’t provide new and interesting experiences, the term would be left in Terry Pratchett novels.
The two types of experiences, from my perspective, are Virtual Reality ones, and then ones I qualify as Reality, only Virtual.
Virtual Reality ones are those that are fake creations that pass as a new reality because you can experience them in immersive, three dimensional form via VR headsets like the Oculus Quest 2, which I own. These are worlds like Second Life, which many of us remember from the three weeks it was the next big thing in 2007. (And not to foil my sarcasm, but it’s still an active, vibrant virtual world with over 900,000 active users.)
Other virtual worlds I’ve played with include Meta/Facebook/Oculus’s Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, VTime XR, EngageVR.io and Spatial.io. And here’s a big insider tip for those of you who have not ventured into the Metaverse: You can go login to all of them on a web browser and experience the whole thing without the need for a VR headset. Yes, the headset delivers an experience that is unlike anything you’ve seen before, but you’ll get the point and be able to play there without dropping $300 on today’s version of a ViewFinder.
Cornett spent an hour together as an agency in Spatial.io last week to get our bearings and talk about the potential of the Metaverse with Mitch Jackson, who has a new book out about how brands can navigate this virtual world.
Member of the Cornett staff met up in Spatial.io and heard Mitch Jackson explain the opportunities of the Metaverse.
Honestly, these virtual worlds are cool to experience. I’ve even connected with a few new people and had a little 3D, coffee-type chat. But they were no more or less interesting than the last 3-4 conversations I had with people at the roulette table.
There are a lot of NFT galleries to walk through (more on those in a moment). There are virtual events ranging from educational talks to virtual concerts. The experiences are neat. But the content is not inherently different than attending a webinar or watching a YouTube video with friends.
And then there are Reality, only Virtual experiences. These are real things you can experience in life, only the 360-degree, virtual headset allows you to experience them virtually. YouTube has a library of 360-degree experience videos. Load those up on your YouTubeVR app in your Oculus and you can …
Skydive
Ride The Beast at Kings Island
Tour Paris (or about any major city in the world)
Experience the Northern Lights from Norway
Stand on the African plain surrounded by lions
Take a helicopter ride around the Matterhorn
And so on.
You can even experience the Reality, only Virtual of things you probably can’t realistically do in real life, like walk around Mars. Thanks Rover!
I can also confirm, just from an incognito browser search not first-hand experience, there are Reality, only Virtual experiences for many things I wouldn’t write about in my newsletter, too.
What happens on your Oculus, stays on your Oculus.
NFTs: The Showroom of our Metaverse casino
Raise your hand if the concept of NFTs doesn’t confuse you. If your hand is up, you’re lying.
Just the term “fungible” is enough to give you a headache trying to decipher. Something that is fungible can be changed or traded for something else. So a Non-Fungible Token is something that can’t be traded for something else. Yet what do you do with NFTs? Trade them.
What nerds create for us to figure out sometimes is irritating.
It turns out the non-changeable part is simply the ledger of who owns the given virtual item, what rights they have to it and so on. Once they sell it, the ledger notes that permanently but keeps the original information, too.
Think of it like being able to buy a house or car and immediately know everyone who has ever owned it before, how much they sold it for, all the improvements and changes they did to it, how much those cost, and so on. But then add to the ledger the fact that the person who built the house can legally bake in a requirement that he or she gets at 2% share of any future sale of that house.
So for anyone who creates intellectual property, digital art, designs, etc., this is a godsend, both legally and financially.
And if Adele does a two-week engagement at the Mirage, I’ll go just to hear her sing live.
But just because you *can* sing doesn’t mean you should. Lots of people are building NFTs and selling or trading them. The only real value they have is that they are NFTs. Once the market realizes the “art” they bought is shitty and no one else really wants it, they’ll realize they took the casino’s free show tickets and have to sit through a William “She Bangs” Hung impersonator.
I also anticipate the IRS is going to have something to say on NFTs along the way. I just hope my bleeding edge friends have bleeding edge tax attorneys.
Cryptocurrency Underlies it All
And that brings me to the final point on the Metaverse. Many places you’ll play in the virtual world operate a lot like video games. In fact, some of them are called “games” in their descriptions even though there are no scores or points or challenges or winners.
These games often have their own currencies for you to advance, or just hang around not bored, in them. So in order to have a virtual house, you’ll buy a certain amount of game tokens and pay for virtual things to make your virtual world virtually kick-ass.
But now the currency in these games isn’t just graphical gold coins or renewable red hearts that represent lives for your character. They’re cryptocurrencies themselves. The virtual world you’re in might use Bitcoin. Or Ethereum. Or any of the dozens of others.
So your game tokens are actually exchangeable for real currency. Or at least currency that can, in a few steps, be converted into real world money.
If you sell 100 NFTs in Decentraland for $100 in MANA (a digital currency), you have $10,000 of income. Do you think the IRS, or any government’s tax bureau, gives a damn where you keep it? Or even what you call the individual base denomination? MANA equals dollars which equals the tax man taking his share.
Yes, cryptocurrency is supposed to be decentralized and not subject to the fees or influences of governments or banks. But income is income. And in the government’s eyes, keeping the equivalent of $100 in MANA in your Decentraland account so it doesn’t show up in your official crypto wallet at tax time falls in the neighborhood of evasion.
What Does This All Mean for Influencers and Brands?
As we began in this narrative, the Metaverse is predicated on experiences. Not unlike Las Vegas, in order to keep people interested and engaged, you have to continually reinvent the experience.
Virtual worlds, and content that is more Reality, only Virtual, are a new palette for creators and brands. Right now, the gatekeepers are big software development companies that have invested significant time and resources to create virtual worlds and experiences. The next step in the evolution of the Metaverse is for creators and brands to either add to them, or create new ones.
If I’m a content creator in 2022, I’m using virtual worlds to create more immersive experiences with my audience. That could be in the form of weekly virtual hangouts in a private space. It could be that I perform something in a public venue and invite everyone to just witness it.
We can move from having several thousand usernames whose accounts give my content permission to appear in their newsfeeds to immersive, personal experiences where I interact with the people behind those usernames more frequently. No travel expenses. No need for masks or vaccinations.
And as I build those new experiences, I’m going to create ways for brand partners to enhance them in relevant ways. So, David Cogen (The Unlockr on social channels) might host a virtual tech talk with his fans, but invite the lead product person from Samsung to answer questions about the latest Galaxy model. An experience like that puts the brand front-and-center to David’s audience, but in a highly relevant and interesting way.
(And I work with David on a client project. So I know he wouldn’t muck it up by just having the Samsung person read off an ad during the event.)
If I’m a brand approaching the Metaverse, I’m going to look for ways like that to be intimately engaged with consumers. That will be the ultimate payoff. But I’m also going to do what brands do:
Set up a virtual home with relevant reasons for consumers to visit me there. Even if it’s just for the easy publicity of being first in my category (for now), it’s probably worth it.
Find places to advertise where the message will be seen or heard by virtual visitors in as contextually relevant ways as possible.
There will be a lot of clumsy for brands. I visited a virtual gallery of Chinese zodiac signs in Spatial.io last week. It was presented by McDonald’s. I appreciate that, but don’t understand the connection. It didn’t make me want to go order french fries, though it did reinforce a positive association with the brand.
But I’m also going to be very thoughtful about how much time and energy I spend in the Metaverse, versus the other places I connect with people. The reason Second Life didn’t turn out to be the Second Coming was it was really built for the one percent of the one percenters. The wealthy and the technorati were the only people who could afford the bandwidth to make the experience worthwhile.
Oculus headsets aren’t cheap. Good enough Internet is still not available to everyone, everywhere. Yes, we’ve closed the gap and virtual worlds have a better chance of being and staying successful now.
But in the end, I’m placing the smart bet: Not everyone will like hanging out with the cigarette smoke and creepy people.
