Experts at Advertising Week discuss the metaverse: ‘your next superpower’
Many agencies understand that the metaverse is going to be a big deal - but fewer understand how and where they’ll fit into this emerging virtual ecosystem. Here are a few experts' thoughts on the metaverse and its impact on agencies during the first day of Advertising Week 2022.
The metaverse could be the next frontier for advertising. / Adobe Stock
What exactly is the metaverse? How will it change the basic rules of advertising? Will agencies have a say in how this new landscape is constructed?
These are just a few examples of the many questions that have recently been swirling through the minds of many agency executives, as new terms like "web3" and "metaverse" crup up in more and more headlines.
Today, the opening day of Advertising Week 2022, three experts who spend much of their professional lives thinking about emergent technologies - Meta’s Bianca Bradford, DDB’s Christine Lane, and VMLY&R’s Luke Hurd - sat down together onstage to explore how the metaverse (as well as artificial intelligence, another radically transformative technology) are transforming the dynamic between agencies and their clients.
Here are some of the noteworthy themes that were discussed:
Don’t be afraid to dream big
The metaverse opens up so many new possibilities, and agencies that are looking to enter this burgeoning space should remember that they need not limit themselves to traditional rules - or even to the laws of physics. “[The metaverse] is a vast new canvas for us to paint on,” Bradford said. “This is allowing for even more creativity in many more fashions that the mind can’t even imagine at this point.”
And given the vast new possibilities that this virtual realm affords, it would be a waste for brands to simply try to recreate models and experiences that already exist in the physical world. “There’s so much potential … but there’s also the danger that we’re just trying to imitate real life in the digital world,” Lane added.
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Web3 isn’t just about technology - it’s about community
Monday’s discussion emphasized the power of blockchain-based technologies to restructure the power dynamics that have prevailed during the web1 and web2 eras, expanding access to information for (theoretically) everyone. This, the speakers agreed, was a central component of web3 that agencies and brands need to understand, if they’re to be successful in the new ecosystem. Lane put it elegantly when she referred to web3 as “the democratization of ownership.”
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The metaverse will build on existing technologies
Hurd said that he’s particularly excited for the moment in which the metaverse - and its associated technologies, such as augmented reality (AR) - become ubiquitous, as smartphones have over the past several years. He also believes that the next wave of transformative technology, rather than existing separately from the devices that most of us carry around all day in our pockets, will be an extension of that technology; “your next superpower," he called it.
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