Page 25 - ADNews magazine March-April 2022

Investigation
Leni, aged 11, spent his Christmas money on clothes for his avatar rather than himself. He plays games within the platform Roblox, like Bedwars, and hangs out with his mates. He lives in both worlds now, the real one and the meta one. The difference is non-existent to him.
His father, Ben Hourahine, strategy partner at creative agency AnalogFolk: “Any children that are in your life, ask around and try to find one that isn’t already on Roblox. My son is pretty forceful with every- one who asks him: ‘It’s not a game, it’s a platform’.”
Roblox, at last report, had 43 million users a day.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg started the latest surge in virtual worlds: “The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.
“In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”
The metaverse dominated the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and the February Super Bowl included metaverse themed spots from Salesforce and Meta.
Trademark applications are reportedly flooding in from big brands staking virtual claims. Among them, McDonald's plans a virtual restau- rant featuring “actual and virtual goods" and operating a virtual restau- rant featuring home delivery.
In building the internet, from the 1980s into the 1990s, the early win- ners were those selling shovels and gold panning equipment -- the servers and the software vendors.
Next came the businesses, with many rising fast and falling faster, before new media players, such as Google and Facebook, and retailers, such as Amazon, emerged and made it an art form. Now the internet is business as usual with online selling accelerated by the pandemic.
Staying with the internet comparison, what was then the World Wide Web (WWW) was a collection of individual bulletin boards which even- tually became linked. The metaverse will probably develop in a similar way, with a series of virtual worlds, linked by on and off ramps.
Based on that scenario, Amazon Web Services is in a lead position to benefit by becoming an enabler with cloud services to host the metaverse. If all this sounds futuristic, it isn’t. The metaverse isn’t new. Neal
Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.
It’s clear everyone wants a piece. Even when it’s not clear who has, or
will have, the winning formula, it is attracting big money.
Meta (formerly Facebook) is tipping in $US10 billion, into the Facebook
Reality Labs division, this year alone.
Microsoft is in the game, spending US$75 billion in January to buy
online gaming giant Activision Blizzard, a spearhead for the metaverse. Forrester analysts: “What this means is that Microsoft is now holding an ever-increasing number of important cards in the developing metaverse: Back-end infrastructure, devices, and a rapidly growing experience platform.”
According to investment bank Jefferies, the metaverse doesn't exist yet but video gaming will be where it starts.
Gaming companies such as Roblox, Minecraft owner Microsoft, and Fortnite creator Epic Games have all been creating multiplayer games that have rapidly become social networks where players hang out, buy accessories, trade and swap stories.
Animoca Brands, formerly listed on the ASX, raised more than US$358 million (about AUD$500 million), in January this year, from a long list of serious venture capital firms. The company is working to build an open metaverse by using blockchain and NFTs to enable digital ownership of users’ virtual assets and data.
Murtaza Akbar, managing partner at Liberty City Ventures: "The trailblazing Animoca Brands is demonstrating to the world the game-changing characteristics of Web3.0 and the open metaverse.
“There is not and likely will not be one ‘the metaverse’. Each iteration of a Metaverse will have various ownership models and generate different value.”
MediaCom, Minsun Collier
Animoca Brands is championing a more decentralised, open, fairer, and more inclusive future where everyone can truly own their digital goods and benefit from them accordingly."
And with gaming you get an ironed-on audience, highly engaged, and that’s where adver- tising comes in.
Jefferies analysts describe the metaverse: “The biggest disrup- tion humans have ever experi- enced, but will take time. A single metaverse could be more than a decade away, but as it evolves it has the potential to disrupt almost everything in human life that has not yet already been disrupted.
“The pandemic accelerated the adoption of various technologies. Many people were forced to spend even more of their lives online from socialising to working, from educa- tion to entertainment. This shift to an online world will continue.”
In advertising, John Wren, CEO of Omnicom, releasing full year results for 2021, described the metaverse, and gaming, as a “high-growth” industry opportu- nity, and one marked for increased investment.
Dentsu is buying land and building a experience space in the metaverse for a beverages client. In the second half of 2021, the Japan-based global agency launched a global gaming solution unit. It now has more than 700 gaming creators globally and has been appointed the lead agency for Facebook Gaming.
But is it a gold rush?
OMD’s Alison Costello (national head of digital) and Nicky Barton (interactive director): “Currently the cheapest price of digital land is 3.7 Ether in Sandbox or 3.46 Ether in
Decentraland – $19,732 and $18,489 respectively.
“It’s safe to say the gold rush has surpassed most of us, especially with the platform tokens increasing by 1000% in the past year.”
Should we all rush in and establish a beachhead, or at least a storefront? Costello and Barton: “Like with any strategy, it’s worth going back to basics to figure out what the goal or objective is.
Concept of a metaverse Colonel via Showpony.