The Metaverse is becoming a BIG DEAL in marketing communications
By Zion Rufus
The Metaverse is fast becoming a big deal in the global marketing and communications industry as data from market research company, Emergen Research has revealed that the global metaverse market size which hit $47.69 Billion in 2020 is expected to reach $828.95 Billion in 2028 registering a CAGR of 43.3% during the forecast period. Google analytics also revealed that interest in the metaverse has peaked. This year, the number of searches for the word increased more than tenfold from 2020 to 2021.
The digital world has become an all-inclusive space where commerce, marketing, advertising, learning, entertainment, social interaction, and community-building can be carried out effortlessly. This can be credited to the growing reliance of the world on technology which is rapidly launching us into the possibility of the Metaverse soon becoming a reality.
“If you check now, recent advertisements from global brands show that they are all launching into the world of games, and the gaming world is a virtual world, and these brands are playing in that space because they see it catching on very quickly,” VP, product marketing and growth at Terragon Group, Oti Ukubeyinje said in a recent interview with MARKETING EDGE.
“The amount of PlayStations and Xbox units that are being sold in Africa for example, will give you an idea of how the Metaverse will quickly catch on because it is a combination of three things: the internet as we know it and access it through our digital devices; the introduction of other types of digital devices that are connected to wearable techs like wristwatches and glasses; and then the complementary function of augmented reality that make hardware and software come alive.”
With the emergence of Extended Reality (XR) i.e a convergence of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR), people will eventually be able to completely immerse themselves in the Metaverse, and Marketing and communications professionals have been advised to pay attention to the metaverse because it is the “next frontier for online interaction”. Just like social media revolutionized the online marketing landscape, so too will the metaverse.
“I think it’s going to be disruptive,”said Lanre Basamta, Group head, mobile financial services, Interswitch.
According to The Trade Desk, brands like Warner Bros., Hyundai and Gucci have built their own virtual worlds; Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch and Crockpot are also tiptoeing into the space by selling NFTs—non-fungible tokens bought and sold on blockchain technology which allow people to own digital items like images or videos; and Sephora, Nike and HBO are leaning into AR and VR experiences.
“We are going into the future and that future is close by. A future where marketing communication agencies, brands, and organizations will create adverts, not for flat screen, but a revolution of immersive visual, textual, and graphical content; a future where the entertainment industry will also make movies that you can’t watch with your bare eyes without the necessary hardwares,” Basamta submitted.
Wunderman Thompson Intelligence disclosed in a report that more than three-quarters (76%) of global consumers say their everyday lives and activities depend on technology, rising to 79% of gen Z (ages 16-26) and 80% of millennials (ages 27-41). And this dependence is informing every aspect of daily life: 64% of global consumers say their social life depends on technology, 61% say their livelihood depends on technology, 56% say their creativity depends on technology, 52% say their happiness depends on technology, and 50% say their wellbeing depends on technology.
Basamta continued: “Today people spend more time in the digital space than offline. They spend more time online for social purposes, fun, interaction, learning purposes, and even remote working. Even when people are eating, at parties, on the road, with friends, with family, they still want to be online, the only time some people are not online is probably when they are fast asleep. And for some reason, some people prefer online friends than real life friends.”
Will Nigeria ever buy into the Metaverse?
Well, Oti Ukubeyinje and Lanre Basamta have opined that Nigeria will catch on very quickly.
“The internet is proliferated globally and technology is also making a huge global shift,” Oti said.
“So, throw all that into a virtual world where people can start to connect the physical world to virtual reality, it becomes something that in a matter of years, the technology will be perfected and the hardware that brings this to life will be shipped across the world. I don’t see why Africa would be left out, African brands need to start thinking about this. And if you want to know how fast these tech advancements are happening even in Nigeria, in places like Abuja and Ikoyi, you would see people driving Teslas; these are electric cars that you would have imagined would take maybe another 5-10 years before they become a thing in Nigeria. I think Africa is going to catch on very quickly,” the VP explained.
On his part, Basamta noted that in 10 years the hardware to support the metaverse will also become affordable.
He shared: “When GSM came, it was unbelievably expensive, sim cards too. Today almost everyone can afford a phone and you can even get sim cards for free. So definitely, in the next 10 years, the hardware to support the metaverse will also become affordable, just like the phones that support the internet of today or the laptops that support the internet of yesterday have become cheaper, the hardwares, the wearables, the headsets, and other technologies will be cheaper and then companies and organizations and even individuals in Nigeria would have adopted these things and our experiences on digital will be vastly improved and radically different and clear for all to see.”
Does the Metaverse exist?
No, not yet. But although it doesn’t yet exist, it is almost here as companies like Facebook, TikTok, Snap Inc., Google, Epic Games, and Microsoft amongst others are fast developing technologies and funneling funds that will power the 360-degree digital experiences.
The metaverse was first coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and described as a blending of digital and physical existence. Others, including Tech giants like Facebook and Microsoft have collectively identified it as an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.
Facebook is investing $50 million and creating 10,000 new jobs across the European Union to help make the building of the Metaverse a reality. In addition, the big tech is investing $150 million in AR/VR training and resources to help learners, creators and developers build new skills, access technologies and unlock opportunities in the metaverse; TikTok is building its own AR development platform, called TikTok Effect Studio; Snap purchased Vertebrae, which helps brands create 3D virtual versions of their products, in July 2021, following the May 2021 acquisition of WaveOptics, the company responsible for the AR display in Snap’s new Spectacles glasses; Microsoft is working on building the “enterprise metaverse”; Epic Games closed a $1 billion round of funding to support its long-term vision for the metaverse; Nvidia jumpstarted its “metaverse for engineers” with the opening of Nvidia Omniverse, a platform which will connect “engineers, designers, and even autonomous machines to create digital twins and industrial metaverses.”
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