We should expect to see the same for the metaverse. Maggie Fox’s Social Media Group as well as Jim Tobin’s Ignite Social Media became some of the first specialty agencies to offer social media counsel and services to brands. Weber Shandwick hired Jeremy Pepper to help start its social and digital media communications practice in 2006. Big agencies snatched them up to take advantage of the growing opportunity, and dedicated social media agencies also emerged. In the early days of social media, leading edge marketers became social media consultants. “Gen Z and millennials don’t see a separation between the digital world and the physical one,” Manuela Strippoli, the company’s communications director, told Vogue Business earlier this year. Yoox, an online luxury discount site that created virtual influencer Daisy, is among the brands with plans to move their virtual influencers into the metaverse. But she’s not the only big time virtual influencer, and some of them are earning millions for their creators. Lil Miquela, a character that was created using CGI, received some notoriety for a kiss with a real person in a Calvin Klein campaign. The Influencer Marketing Factory reports that the virtual influencer market hit $4.6 billion in 2018 and was expected to grow 25% annually through 2025. Virtual influencers are already here, and the metaverse is a natural fit for them. Where does this lead marketers? How will marketers reach audiences in the metaverse? It’s clear that we are quickly advancing on this front toward an unprecedented reality (or set of realities). Companies like Epic, which owns Fortnite, have adopted the terminology to describe the worlds inside their video games, and social media platforms like Meta are touting their plans to help create the future. The metaverse is thus far more of a concept, embodying a set of experiences in immersive virtual reality worlds where people can interact and exist.
As augmented reality moved onto our phones to become second nature and virtual reality hardware gained in acceptance, the future wants us to take yet another step - right into the metaverse.
The early part of the coronavirus pandemic made staying home and conducting life digitally commonplace for nearly all of us. (Though, that SecondLife never went away.) We’re in the midst of a second chance for a second life. (Image credit: Uriel Soberanes / Unsplash)
0 kommentar(er)
