MxMIndia

Tag: Metaverse

  • Over the next decade, a new age will dawn that lessens humankind's obsession with the screen, writes Ashoke Agarrwal

    The Third Eye Flutters

     

     

    By Ashoke Agarrwal

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalThe Screen Age dawned with the spread of TV. Today, it has reached its apex with the ubiquity of the smartphone.

     

    There are now indications that over the next decade, a new age will dawn that lessens humankind’s obsession with the screen.

     

    I have always considered augmented reality more potent than virtual reality and could not fathom Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse. A week ago, Zuckerberg revealed a use case for virtual reality technology that made immediate commercial sense in his interview with Lex Friedman.

     

    The interview itself was perhaps the first public demo of a powerful new technology that Meta has developed – Pixel Codec Avatars (PiCA): “a deep generative model of 3D human faces that achieves state of the art reconstruction performance while being computationally efficient and adaptive to rendering conditions during execution”. Behind the technical jargon is a hot new metaverse experience that led a usually stone-faced gnome like Lex Friedman to drool.

     

    PiCA is poised to take over the online meeting space at the high end, pending software and hardware developments.

     

    Beyond PiCA, the interview revealed a shift in Zuckerberg’s attitude that will make Meta more of an Augmented Reality (AR) player than a Virtual Reality (VR) player.

     

    Zuckerberg speaks about thinking of AR as a shift in how people experience everyday reality in contrast to VR or the Metaverse, which is about people living in a separate reality.

     

    Zuckerberg now sees an AR world as one that adds a 4th dimension to the 3-D world of time and space we live in – the AR-driven digital dimension – not as static or moving texts and images on a screen – but as an integral part of the lived reality – an integral part that instead of detracting us from our surroundings, immerses us deeper in it.

     

    Zuckerberg thinks that with advances in AI, IoT, and PiCA technology, we could be, in a decade or so, living in a world where two people wearing Quest 2030, a spectacle light VR set, can play table tennis on a holographic table with holographic paddles and ball! When the game is over the table, the paddles and ball return to the digital world, leaving the real-world 3D space accessible to the next visitor from the digital dimension.

     

    The failure of Google Glass in the consumer world was because it was just an uncomfortable shifting of the screen from a handheld to a lens in front of our eyes.

     

    AR is now in its second generation, where leaps in bandwidth and computing power combined with innovations like PiCA will allow for wearable headsets that are as comfortable for all-day use as spectacles and which project digital 3D objects into real 3D space that one can interact with through voice, gesture, and other digital 3D things.

     

    That will be a whole new paradigm in experiencing reality.

     

    When it takes hold, it will be the screen’s death. A paradigm that will add a new sense organ to us humans – the Third Eye- bringing into our lives a fourth digital but actual dimension to our old-world three-dimensional reality. The Screen Age brought us distraction and shallowness of thought- almost a collapsing of our world into 2D. What will the Era of the Third Eye get us? It is difficult to predict, but the magnitude of change in the human experience will be almost metaphysical.

     

    Why do I feel the Third Eye is fluttering, heralding the not-too-distant dawning of the Era of the Third Eye? Besides the revelations in the Zuckerberg interview, another rumour said that Sam Altman of Open AI and the legendary designer Jony Ive (of iPhone fame) plan to collaborate on an AI hardware device. I bet a million dollars that it will be a Third Eye design if they come up with one.

     

    When I was a kid in the 1960s, we used to drool over the Dick Tracy watch that did all sorts of things and fantasise about what devices advertised as X-Ray glasses would do for us. Over the next decade or so, the world will likely be flooded with Third Eye devices, a combination of a powerful wrist computer and lightweight, normal-looking eyeglasses, delivering an almost godlike dimension to everyday reality.

     

  • To lead business expansion in AR, VR and Metaverse technology offerings

    ImmersionX appoints Sunder Rajan as its CEO

    By Our Staff

     

    ImmersionX Technologies appoints R. Sunder Rajan as its CEO. He will manage and lead business expansion in AR, VR and Metaverse technology offerings.

     

    Rajan’s brings over 25 years of professional experience in various technology and business verticals. He has managed large teams across geographies. Prior to joining ImmersionX, he has worked in organisations like Exela Technologies, WIPRO, Wolters Kluwer. His last responsibility with Exela Technologies was as SVP – APAC Operations.

     

    Said Parvez Nasyam – Founder, ImmersionX Technologies: “We welcome Mr. Sunder Rajan onboard! With his passion for technology combined with leadership expereince over the years, we hope to achive greater heights.”

     

  • It's key to have a fit between a brand's proposition and the essential motivation that drive gamers, writes Ashoke Agarrwal

    Advertising in the Gameverse: The Need for a New Paradigm

     

     

    By Ashoke Agarrwal

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalWhile the Metaverse is just a gleam (fading?) in Zuckerberg’s eyes and Large Language Models is the latest hot tech trend, the Gameverse has, over the past decades, changed, almost unnoticed, the media world.

    The numbers are impressive enough.

     

    The forecast is that consumers will spend USD 185 billion globally on video games – five times more than they will spend on cinema and 70% more than what they will spend on TV streaming services like Netflix. The latest Harry Potter title, “Hogwart’s Legacy” – a video game – took in USD 850 million in two weeks. Gaming concepts are spawning TV and movie spin-offs- “The Last of Us” on HBO and the upcoming movie – “Tetris’ – on Apple TV. Increasingly powerful smartphones put gaming consoles in consumers’ pockets, increasing the time spent on games. Smart TVs, streaming and subscription libraries will further accelerate the growth of games. In 2022 3.2 billion people – four in ten worldwide played video games, rising by 100 million annually. Gaming occupies the entire engagement spectrum – from individual absorption to small and large group play to a mass spectator activity that is e-sports. E-sports is now among the big leagues of sport. For example, Riot Games sold the streaming rights of its Chinese league to Huya, a streaming service, for USD 310 million. The Asian Games in September will include digital games.

     

    Besides the growing audience for professional e-sports, there is an equally large audience for user-generated gaming content. With its USD 30 billion ad revenue, YouTube says gaming is its second largest category after music. In addition, Twitch, a user-generated gaming content platform, has over half a million quarterly active streamers. Gaming-As-A-Service (GAAS) is a growing business model. “World of Warcraft” offers a subscription service with regular updates to maps, missions and characters. Grand Theft Auto has blockbuster sequels, and GTA Online offers continuously refreshed content at $6 a month.

     

    What about gaming in India? In value terms, it is small but growing – USD 1.2 billion in 2020 and projected to grow at a CAGR of 26%. However, gaming’s reach in India is already high. Five hundred and ten million people played video games in India in 2022. 94% of Indian gamers use mobiles as their platform, 9% use PCs and 4% play on consoles.

     

    Over the coming decades, will India leapfrog into being an advanced video game market? Perhaps, given the fast pace of technology diffusion as a society transits upwards economically.

     

    Given the preferences of the young and its multi-directional growth, gaming will be the driver of a new media paradigm.

     

    What about advertising in the Gameverse? Does it need a new paradigm?

     

    Advertising strategy and grammar underwent a paradigm shift from the age of print to the age of radio and then TV. Over the last two decades, with the advent of search and social media, performance marketing has driven a seminal shift in advertising grammar. In addition, the age of generative AI will significantly impact advertising processes and economics.

     

    If brands and their advertising are to harness the opportunity that gaming presents, they will have to resonate with gamers’ unique needs and motivations.

     

    A 2020 book – Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen – offers insight into why games engage people.

     

    Games engage because they are a motivational inversion of life. In life, means are for the sake of ends; in games, ends are for the sake of means.

     

    People play games because they offer them the chance to assume different roles within a given set of rules. The gamer plays to achieve a particular end, but the engagement and enjoyment are in the playing. The core motivation driving gaming engagement is that it offers the gamer an agency different from his real-life persona. This agency transformation is true not just for video games but even simple games like card games of poker or rummy. Many highly engaged players of these card games assume a game persona that is very different from the real persona. For example, a quiet man transforms into a chatty one at the card table, and a chatty one becomes the strong, silent type.

     

    The highly creative and immersive worlds of modern video games multiply the agency that games offer to unprecedented levels.

     

    The mediums of television, radio and advertising offer convenient spaces where advertising can insert itself without any connection or reference to the content it has interrupted. The creative challenge here is to overcome the irritation caused by the interruption. This challenge multiplied with the arrival of the multi-channel world and the remote control, but the core challenge and the response remained the same.

     

    In the era of performance marketing, the creative challenge of overcoming the urge to ignore remains. However, the grammar has shifted with the arrival of performance marketing; the objective now is action – click a link – and not the amorphous building of brand awareness and equity.

     

    In the Gameverse, interruption is not a challenge; it is taboo, given the intense nature of the engagement. Instead, the advertising’s challenge in the Gameverse is multi-fold:

    :: An advertised brand needs to be present as an integral part of the gaming experience and not as an interruption.

    :: The brand needs to allow the gamer to remain in their chosen persona.

    :: Outside the game, the gamer’s interaction with the game continues by creating and watching user-generated content and e-sports events centred on that game. The brand can maximize its impact by a) enabling the gamer to generate content and b) enhancing the gamer’s experience as a spectator of e-sports or other user-generated content.

     

    The path to profiting from advertising in the Gameverse is to choose a shortlist of games to focus on and build a 360-degree customized strategy for each game. The advertising strategy focused on a specific game that follows the tenet of going with the game’s flow can only be achieved in collaboration with the game creators. Therefore, good advertising within a game is not about buying space and time but about a creative partnership with the game’s creators.

     

    For example, a brand could offer a bonus race in a specially branded car in a car-racing game. Red Bull has done so in some games.

     

    The higher the degree of integration into the game, the greater the impact and, thus, the ROI for the advertiser’s brand. For example, a game-integrated brand could offer players a branded assistant who analyses, offers tips and gives pep talks. With advances in generative AI, such a strategy offers fascinating possibilities. Moreover, this assistant becomes a part of the content creation and e-sports-watching experience outside the game.

     

    Is the Gamverse advertising opportunity category agnostic? TV, press and digital are product category agnostic in that advertising across product categories can be effective with the right creative and media strategy.

     

    Given its unique characteristics, advertising in the Gameverse can be genuinely effective for categories and brands that, at the core, connote a persona and a lifestyle- fashion, personal accessories, cars etc.

     

    The estimate is that in 2020 advertising in the Gameverse worldwide was USD 65 billion. By consensus, the most effective brand with its Gameverse advertising strategy is Red Bull, with a Gameverse budget of nearly USD 600 million. Red Bull’s core brand proposition is that it empowers its consumers – encapsulated in the theme “Red Bull Give You Wings”. This brand proposition resonates in the Gameverse, where the primary motivation driving Gamers is, as Ngyuven’s book proposes, to find a new persona, a new agency – a new set of wings.

     

    To sum up, if your brand is considering the Gameverse as a medium for advertising, first make sure that there is a fit between your brand’s proposition and the essential motivation that drive gamers. The subsequent steps then consist of finding a suitable game or a concise list of games to focus on and building a partnership with the game developers to create a highly integrated brand presence in the game.

     

  • A collaborative effort of RCCL, Madison Media and eCultify

    KamaSutra creates virtual museum on Metaverse

    By Our Staff

     

    Kamasutra, sexual wellness brand from Raymond Consumer Care Limited (RCCL), creates ‘Kamaverse’, a virtual museum on the Metaverse. Targeted at GenZ, this offering chronicles the ancient Indian history on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfilment in life with a fresh outlook, thanks to the revolutionary technological advancements the Web3 era.

     

    Kamaverse is a collaborative effort of RCCL; Madison Media and eCultify.

    Speaking about Kamasutra’s latest disruption, Pooja Sahgal, Chief Marketing Officer, RCCL, said: “Kamasutra has always been a pioneer in the sexual wellness category. Guided by the brand purpose of ‘Unleashing Confident Lovers’, we created a contemporary and innovative space on the Metaverse called the Kamaverse – another first in the sexual wellness category. This one-of-a-kind space is a virtual museum experience with different zones that chronicles ancient KamaSutra with a modern and fresh outlook and also a platform to explore and engage the young consumers enabling them to ‘Make Love Like Never Before’. We also created a virtual Influencer – Kamya – present inside the Space to guide the users through the zones. We are pleased and confident that with Kamaverse’s appeal and modern outlook – a safe space for both pleasure and education that the young consumers would greatly benefit.”

     

    Vandana Ramakrishna, COO, Madison Media, Ace, added: “The launch of Kamasutra’s own Metaverse campaign is yet another success story delivered in collaboration with RCCL, Madison Media and eCultify. Madison Loop Team has worked hard to create interactive and immersive experiences for their audiences through their content, which keeps the target hooked and booked throughout the campaign. eCultify has been a reliable partner for artistic design and for creating one-of-a-kind experiences for mobile and desktop users. eCultify and Madison Loop’s effortless alignment to our vision and smart execution make success story creation much easier just before the launch.”

     

    Founders of eCultify Mayur Khatwani and Vivek Kumar said: “We have created multiple Metaverse experiences for our clients, but the one for Kamasutra has, by far, been the most satisfying (pun intended). The creative vision brought in by the Madison World’s team and RCCL helped us craft this one-of-a-kind experience that we cannot wait to share with the world! We have been able to let our minds run free and execute our ideas which most other brands might not allow us to do. We are looking forward to a longer-term collaboration with both Madison World and RCCL.”

     

    Click here to enter Kamaverse : http://kamaverse.in/.

     

  • In coordination with Digital Behaviour Initiative

    Dentsu India releases report: ‘Adoption of XR technology in India’

    By Our Staff

     

    Dentsu India has released its latest research report titled ‘Adoption of XR technology in India’. The report has been created in collaboration with Recogn – Dentsu India’s research division, and Digital Behaviour Initiative – started by Dr Sumitava Mukherjee at IIT Delhi.

     

    Digital Behaviour Initiative aims to work as a non-partisan academic research-based information tank in India that engages and informs the public about key aspects of human behaviour or cognition in the digital world. The report has been jointly designed by Dr Sumitava Mukherjee from IIT Delhi and Dr Payel C Mukherjee from IIIT Delhi.

     

    The report discusses the various aspects of immersive XR technologies that will change the face of business and improve customer experiences. It also addresses consumer attitudes toward extended reality technologies. Additionally, it delves into how businesses can align themselves to implement these technologies in their operations, processes, etc.

     

    The launch of 5G services in India has only added to the digital landscape’s boom. This is a defining moment in the ease of doing business and will revolutionise the digital sector. It will boost the Indian economy and reform industries such as agriculture, healthcare, education, logistics, transportation, and fintech. 5G services will significantly improve the nation’s digital ecosystem and usher in the next phase of the industrial revolution.

     

    The initial purpose of using a VR device for users was entertainment like attending concerts, watching movies, or playing games. The level of detail in the Metaverse combined with the ability to network in one platform is set to alter the course of human interaction. The most important aspect of moving on to this phase would be hardware in the form of virtual reality headsets. XR technologies including Metaverse, and VR devices will herald a new era of experience. Businesses will need to raise awareness and develop robust use cases to move customer adoption of this technology from novelty to necessity.

     

    Simi Sabahaney

    Commenting on the report, Simi Sabhaney, Chief Growth Officer, Dentsu India said: “In the Indian context, an immersive technology such as extended reality needs to gain widespread adoption across multiple sectors , in order to improve efficiencies, collaborations, and innovation. Introduction of 5G services in India, heralds new opportunities. Furthermore, immersive experiences will push us beyond the edge. Investments in this technology will accelerate adoption and innovative applications. The growth of metaverse will boost the adoption of extended reality, and together they will play a role in solving real-world problems. Brands should fast-track their focus toward incorporating these technologies into new strategies to lay a solid foundation for the internet’s future.”

     

  • Excerpts from the just-released IAMAI-Deloitte report titled 'Metaverse – The Hype, Possibilities, and Beyond'

    Tracking the Metaverse

     

     

     

    By Our Staff

     

    The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in association with Deloitte launched a report titled ‘Metaverse – The Hype, Possibilities, and Beyond’ at Digital Marketing Conference, ‘Marcon 2022’ in Mumbai on Monday (Dec 12).

     

    The report was launched by Sreeram Ananthasayanam, Partner, Deloitte. The event also saw a panel discussion after the launch.

     

    Here is the Executive Summary of the report:

    Technology is getting affordable, scalable, and trustable, and transforming business models and consumer expectations. Robust and scalable digital infrastructure and applications are enabling personalisation for a generation that prefers differentiated experiences. In addition, alternative technologies (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations [DAO], Decentralized finance [DeFi], Nonfungible token [NFTs]) are disrupting digital ecosystems by disintermediating intermediaries and decentralising ownership. Technology is building decentralised trust to make processes and transactions efficient, transparent, and seamless.

     

    One such technology is Metaverse, which refers to an immersive, interactive, and live virtual environment, distinguished by its ability to transport the real-world experience into a virtual world. In this world, people across locations can interact live and work in real time. This is supported by a digital economic infrastructure powered by virtual digital assets. Metaverse is a confluence of technologies that aims to integrate businesses in innovative ways, enhances operational efficiencies and transactions, and provides an experience par excellence. It creates new market avenues, which are futuristic, yet revolutionary. The exponential nature of technology growth is only going to make it more feasible and affordable. Several enterprises and customers are foraying into this space that is redefining business models and customer expectations.

     

    In this report, we aim to understand how businesses engage and interact with each other in a Business-to-Business (B2B) and Businessto-Consumer (B2C) ecosystem. We believe that adopting Metaverse is possible through the merging together of the physical and digital worlds (phygital). It will help businesses reduce costs, collaborate in real time, overcome logistics issues, provide enhanced opportunities and productivity, improve feedback processes, and offer possibilities for product and service augmentations. All these will not only generate revenue but may tilt the competitive advantages in favour of those ahead in the adoption curve. It will enable businesses to take a step towards introducing environment friendly policies and sustainability.

     

    Metaverse is a ‘virtual world’ with real people in digital avatars, who come together to interact and transact. Hence, the boundaries for work and play are blurred. Such a concept is hard to understand, monitor, and regulate because of the undefined rules and unimaginable complexities that may exist. In the following chapters, we begin with our understanding of Metaverse as the world is still exploring its confluence in the Phygital space. We also debate on the possibilities of different types of Metaverse architectures and their potential across enterprises. Subsequently, we discuss the challenges that will likely arise while implementing the Metaverse ecosystem and the possible measures to sustain business in a dynamic marketplace.

     

    There is also a section that provides an overview of the applications of Metaverse and its potential across sectors. We will discuss the art of possibilities for enterprise Metaverse and how it will help enterprises scale and diversify their businesses and opportunities by using the myriad elements of the Metaverse economy. While most of the current use cases on Metaverse primarily relate to the B2C segment, this report also explains the potential enterprise-grade use cases that address the B2B segment.

     

    Conclusion of the report:

    The Metaverse technology is likely to see exponential growth in the coming years with rising awareness about its applications and rapid advancements in the digital infrastructure and digital natives gaining purchasing power.

     

    On one hand, as the supply side of the Metaverse ecosystem develops, more organisations are likely to reorient their business to take advantage of this evolving technology. Several organisations have already announced their Metaverse offerings, which may help achieve the required scale and demand to improve cost-effectiveness and adoption rate. On the other hand, the demand side of this ecosystem. has been driven by demography, along with phygital worlds, virtual work/play facilitated due to the pandemic, and Moore’s law playing its role in making the infrastructure affordable.

     

    The success of Metaverse penetration will depend on the time organisations take to understand its relevance to their business and the pace of this ecosystem’s development. The ability to ramp up the technical skills and readiness, and deal with rising cyber threats will be critical to its adoption. Governments can play an important role through the right regulatory policies and incentives for new-gen tech adoption.

     

  • Brands and marketers who experiment with the emerging Metaverse today will be in pole position as the tech matures, writes Ashoke Agarrwal

    The Metaverse: A Reality Check

     

     

    By Ashoke Agarrwal

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalThe world woke up to the Metaverse concept when Facebook Inc decided, in October 2021, to change its name to Meta Platforms Inc and announced a $10 billion bet on making the Metaverse a reality soon.

     

    Zuckerberg’s gambit was an exercise in re-positioning.

     

    However, he seemed to have instead raised both public expectations and internal strife.

     

    A New York Times reporter, Kashmir Hill, spent many hours our days donning Oculus 2 and logged into Horizon Worlds, Facebook’s nascent Metaverse platform. She filed a report that broadly expressed disappointment.

    A few days later, another New York Times article laid bare the internal strife in Meta over the Metaverse bet.

     

    Zuckerberg seemed to have gone public with a concept too soon. Sooner than the concept itself was anywhere near being realised. And when his company was a clear laggard in the core technology race to the Metaverse. As a result, Zuckerberg faces the twin storms of falling revenues in his legacy business and cratering capital markets valuations.

     

    In his book “The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything “, Matthew L Ball masterfully outlines this race.

     

    He starts with a carefully crafted definition of the Metaverse that portends the technology challenge in its every word.

     

    “The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

     

    Mr Ball believes that the Metaverse will change the world on a scale that the Internet has done. However, he clarifies that a fully realised Metaverse is still decades away.

     

    The critical technology challenges that the builders of the Metaverse face are in the areas of:

    :: Real-time 3D rendering,

    :: Assuring synchronicity

    :: And persistence and inter-operability

     

    The leaders in the race to real-time 3D rendering are Epic Games and Unity Technologies. Their gaming engines – Unreal and Unity – are currently game developers’ favorite real-time rendering engines.

     

    Further, Mr. Ball identifies three gaming platforms much closer to the proto-Metaverse concept than Meta Platform’s “Horizon Worlds”. These are Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite Creative.

     

    Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite Creative are far ahead of Meta’s Horizon Worlds regarding the number of developers building virtual worlds on these platforms and the number of daily and monthly users. A key difference is the leading platforms do not require a VR set, while Horizon Worlds is accessible only through the Oculus 2. Mr. Ball does not think immersion through a VR set is a definitional feature of the Metaverse.

     

    The leadership of Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite Creative is also evident in terms of the response of marketers and brands. A recent paper by McKinsey titled “Marketing in the Metaverse: An opportunity for innovation and experimentation.” lists some ongoing brand initiatives.

     

    Gucci launched a Gucci World on Roblox to start forging a brand relationship with Gen Z. Epic Games of Fortnite, and Unreal fame has announced a partnership with Lego to build a virtual world for kids. Skateboarding retailer Vans has tasted success with a Vans World on Roblox, where visitors can explore skating skills with friends and collect points to spend on virtual sneakers, apparel and even custom-made skates. Last November, NASCAR partnered with Badimo, the developers of the popular Roblox game Jailbreak, to add a branded vehicle to the game for a ten-day event. In this nascent era of the Metaverse, marketing and brands need to focus their Metaverse initiatives on brand-building rather than sales. However, a decade or two down the road, the Metaverse will be an economy by itself, and marketers and brands will see it as a key market in terms of the following:

    :: Direct-to-Avatar (DTA) sales of branded digital goods: Every brand and marketer will need to focus on creating digital goods as most people will live a parallel life as digital avatars and spend significant money on products and services for their avatars.

    :: Virtual-To-Reality (VTR) and Reality-to-Virtual (RTV) commerce, as coupons earned in the real world, are exchanged for goods in the virtual world and vice-versa.

     

    Brands and marketers who experiment with the emerging Metaverse today will be in pole position as the Metaverse matures and becomes a whole new market by itself.

     

    Mr. Ball, in his book, outlines the use case in a world that is part of the mature Metaverse that captures the impact of the Metaverse in the world of education:

     

    “Students from around the world will be able to strap into a virtual classroom, sit alongside their peers while making eye contact with their teacher, then shrink down to blood cells which travel through a human circulatory system, after which these previously 15-micrometre-tall students re-enlarge and dissect a virtual cat.”

     

    In a section later, Mr. Ball envisages these students converging after class for a game of basketball and then test-driving a digital version of the latest car (designed to the smallest detail to be a digital version of the real-world model).

     

    The impact of the Metaverse is going to be multi-dimensional and profound. However, the full realization is still a decade or two away. Despite that, it is imperative that every profession, including marketing, starts experimenting today to meet the opportunity and the challenge.

     

    In conclusion, let me lay out a few pointers, as suggested by the McKinsey team, for brands and marketers as they begin to experiment with the proto-Metaverse:

    :: Look for build engagement and brand presence rather than sales

    :: Choose carefully within the existing platforms – Roblox, Fortnite, Decentraland, Minecraft and Horizon Worlds.

    :: Create experiences.

    :: Explore partnerships and collaborations

    :: Proactively plan for risks to the brand

    :: Rethink how you measure marketing success

     

  • Creative ideation and careful build-up could evolve the platform into a brand asset and a societal asset, writes Ashoke Agarrwal

    Ashoke Agarrwal: Big Brands, The Digital World and The Promise of Brand Platforms

    Ashoke Agarrwal
    Ashoke Agarrwal

    By Ashoke Agarrwal

    Time was when all a brand manager had to do was decide on the season’s marketing mix (summer and winter), get the agency to produce a new mass media campaign (or refurbish the existing one), and kickback.

    It all changed with the emergence of digital marketing. Managing brands is now a daily grind. Digital campaigns have shelf lives measured in days and, many times, hours. Pricing and price promotions are a flux controlled by rising e-commerce. Competition now stretches beyond the cosy, almost collegiate set of yesteryears to, driven by the phenomenon of contract manufacturing, e-commerce and D2C, into a kaleidoscope of threats.

    How have the older big brands in traditional FMCG (personal care, home and garment care, packaged foods etc.), durables (white and brown appliances, electronics, auto etc) and services (banks, credit cards, insurance, hotels, restaurants, travel, movies, broadcast/ cable TV etc) met the challenges of the digital age? To my thinking, their performance, by and large, has been poor and, at the core, indolent.

    Old habits die hard. The old brands are still stuck trying to run an AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) based on what is essentially mass marketing.

    At the cognitive level, everyone in the marketing team of old brands will enthusiastically endorse the notion that the digital world allows for one-on-one interactive communication with the individual. However, dig into their marketing communication plans, and one will discern the same laziness of yore when message targeting was left to the vagaries of communication channels. The difference is that now they have added Google, Facebook and Instagram to the mix. And of course, the lexicon of performance marketing – likes, shares and clickthroughs – to the mass media metrics of reach, OTS and GRPs.

    How many brands today are anchored in the essential promise of the digital marketing age? This fundamental promise is the ability to carry out cost-effectively and efficiently one-on-conversations with not just thousands but millions of individuals. And in the process generating not just sales but loyalty, increased lifetime value of each consumer and even passionate brand advocates.

    This is a model of marketing I call EIDA – Engagement, Interaction, Delivery, Advocacy.

    If there are brands keyed into this essential promise of digital marketing, they are most likely the disrupters who are upending existing categories. Even among them, going by my personal experience in India, these disrupters, spoiled by VC burn money, soon fall into the big-spending lazy AIDA framework of broad-spectrum targeting, consigning the EIDA framework to discarded business plans.

    Let’s get back to where we started this article – the big, successful brands in traditional FMCG, durables and services. It is, to my mind, a shame that nearly all of them have botched the promise of the digital age. With the resources, ecosystem and talent at their disposal, they could have been at the forefront of a new marketing era. Instead, primarily due to their failure, we have a marketing paradigm that is ever more dysfunctional than the pre-digital one, with marketing dollars now funding tribalism, conspiracy and hate-mongering through increasingly influential social media platforms. Unfortunately, the Arab Spring was not the only promise of social media that has been so severely belied.

    When I ponder the many ways successful brands could better use the digital world – the one idea that strikes me as robust and viable is positioning the brand not just as a product or service but as a platform for something larger than itself. Only a successful, well-resourced brand with high credibility could create a good platform with broader social acceptability. To my mind, this is a unique, as yet non-utilised, competitive advantage that big brands have in the digital age.

    Can a big brand in any category have the opportunity to build a platform larger than itself or its category that has wide social acceptability?

    To my mind, yes. In some categories, the platform idea might stare one in the face. In others, it might require brainstorming and creative thinking.

    As an example, let’s take Ariel in the fabric care category. I admired the Ariel campaign that promoted the idea of more equitable burden-sharing between genders. Can Ariel go beyond and promote a platform that a) enables the community to share ideas and experiences in this area b) enables individuals and others to offer workshops, tracking tools and other enabling services and products. Incidentally, when it comes to equitable burden-sharing, the flow is multilateral – woman-to-man and man-to-woman. In fact, it can go beyond gender to age – young-to-old, old-to-young, work – organisation-to-worker, worker-to-organisation. In other words, the platform could be about two-way responsibility sharing. Creative ideation and careful build-up could evolve the platform into a brand asset and a societal asset.

    How can such a platform be used as a brand asset? In myriad ways. I am sure the many marketing minds reading this already are brimming with ideas on ways to kickstart the EIDA cycle. I will be glad to take a conversation in this regard offline.

    So if Ariel built the responsibility-sharing platform, what is Surf – an equally large fabric care brand – to do? Well, the ladder up from fabric care can go in many directions. For example, fabrics and garments are how an individual signals her mood, character, class and ethnicity. So Surf could build a platform where people discuss clothes are and can be used as social signals. The platform can then expand to all forms of social signalling other than clothes.

    It must be kept in mind that the theoretical possibility of brand platform existed in the pre-digital era. However, it is only the cost-efficient reach of digital media, the burgeoning fields of data mining and analytics, and AI that makes it possible for brands to build platforms with viable levels of ROI. Furthermore, the likely emergence of the metaverse over the coming decade will add further dimensions and depth.

    I have deliberately chosen the rather mundane category of fabric care to illustrate the potential of brand platforms. Making the point that almost any product category offers exciting brand platform possibilities provided that the brand is thriving and has the resources and credibility. And that more than one such brand in the same product category can build effective platforms.

  • The name of the company would surely create an illusion of a monopoly, writes Indrani Sen

    Indrani Sen: Monopolising the Metaverse

    Indrani SenBy Indrani Sen

     

    Seventeen years after he launched Facebook from his university dorm in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg announced in a virtual press conference on October 29, 2021, a change of the corporate name of the company from Facebook Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc. which is being referred in short as Meta.

     

    A recent Amul topical ad on the ‘Meta’ change

    As explained by Zuckerberg, internet technology has moved on and the corporate name Facebook no longer fits in with the future vision of the company which is being built around the metaverse. “Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards,” Zuckerberg said.

     

    The rebranding of the company name would align better with the objectives of the company at this stage when it plans to broaden its reach beyond social media into areas like virtual reality (VR). The various social media platforms owned by the social media giant, i.e. Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram would continue to retain their individual names and brand identities under the corporate branding of “Meta”.

     

    The metaverse a virtual-reality space in which users can interact, meet and play with a computer-generated environment and other users using virtual reality glasses, smartphone apps and other devices. The word “metaverse” has been coined from the two words “meta” and “universe”. Loosely defined, it is an extensive 3D online world where people interact via various “digital avatars.” The word meta is generally used as an adjective or as a prefix to a name, often indicating a change or a transformation or a great futuristic idea. Example of uses of metaverses, in some limited form, can already be found on platforms like VR Chat or video games like Second Life.

     

    Current development on use of metaverse is centred on addressing the technological limitations with modern virtual and augmented reality devices as well as expanding the use of metaverse spaces beyond business to retail applications, entertainment and education. Many digital technology organisations as well as entertainment and social media companies are investing in metaverse-related research and development for future usage.

     

    The metaverse in many ways is still a speculative future iteration of the Internet part of shared virtual reality, to be used in social media and other applications. The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds operated by social media companies but the entire spectrum of augmented reality across the world wide web.

     

    Critics of the metaverse are arguing that as a speculative concept it is overhyped. Same concept is being used as a part of public relation campaigns by organisations having vested interests. Privacy of user’s information and user’s addiction to platforms are concerns within the metaverse, as already found in the current challenges being faced by the social media and video game industries across the world.

     

    Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement to change Facebook’s name to Meta has caused a massive uproar in Israel as the word “meta” sounds like the Hebrew word for “dead”. There is also a news that a US-based Meta Company is contemplating to sue Facebook Inc. for Infringing on its it’s company name. Meta was founded by Menon Gribetz, then a student of Colombia University in 2013. Though the company met with some initial success, it had to declare itself as insolvent after its primary lender foreclosed in January 2019. It is doubtful if they have the financial strength to launch a legal battle against Zuckerberg’s company. A Berlin based migraine app developed by Newsenselab M-Sense Magazine has given a backhanded compliment to Facebook who seemingly has been inspired by the logo design of the e-magazine. It is unlikely that Facebook was aware about the existence of that app or its logo and the similarity id the logo design is most likely a creative coincidence which at times happen in the advertising industry.

     

    The change in the company name is an extremely clever move by Zuckerberg which can help his company to monopolise “the metaverse” space, though many other companies will be using such technologies and operating in the same space in near future. To a lay internet user, Meta Platforms inc. would appear as the original provider of metaverse technology and therefore would have an edge over many of their future competitors.  Meta Platforms Inc. would not be able to monopolise the metaverse, but the name of the company would surely create an illusion of a monopoly.