How (and why) agencies are adapting to stay relevant in the metaverse

By Alexander Lee

As brands speed up their metaverse activity in 2022, agencies are adjusting their game plans to stay relevant in the virtual world to come.

These days, proto-metaverse platforms like Roblox and Fortnite are chock-full of virtual activations by brands such as AT&T and Ralph Lauren. These branded spaces are often designed by in-game developer studios, most of whom began as casual players. “At first, we would hear from [Fortnite developer] Epic Games, and they would put us in touch with different brands,” said Michael Herriger, CEO of Fortnite studio Atlas Creative, whose clients include LG, Alienware and the NBA. “Our business model now is kind of broken up into the two different deals we get — an Epic Games brand deal, and then a third-party deal.”

These in-game studios essentially act as metaversal agencies, designing and implementing brands’ virtual activations much as a traditional agency would in a physical space. This doesn’t mean traditional agencies have been made obsolete by the metaverse — Atlas Creative’s LG activation was designed by the electronics company’s in-house agency, for example — but activations such as NASCAR’s recent foray into Roblox have been designed and implemented entirely by developers, without agencies’ help. NASCAR provided the intellectual property and visual assets, and the developer studio Badimo implemented them into its Roblox game, Jailbreak, and that was it — no need for an agency to get involved.

The emergence of these in-game studios, and their ensuing brand partnerships, has created competition for traditional agencies. “I don’t think agencies can ignore this new space,” said Charles Hambro, CEO of esports and gaming consultancy and data platform GEEIQ. “You know, we went from print advertising in the 90s, and then suddenly social media came up, and everyone went, ‘oh my god, we need a social media strategy.’ A lot of the brands and agencies that I speak with, they refer back to that and say this feels like when we went from print to social media. Suddenly, we had to learn this whole new world.”

To get more comfortable in this new environment, some agencies are getting involved in experimental projects to stake their claim to the metaverse. Companies such as agency holding group S4 Capital have held board meetings in Horizon Workrooms; in December, Mediahub moved into the metaverse by establishing both a virtual office in the metaverse platform Decentraland and a dedicated channel on the messaging service Discord.

“Our use of Decentraland is less of an attempt at mirroring an office space; it’s more that we have this starting point with one of the major platforms,” said Simeon Edmunds, svp and creative director at Mediahub. “More than being a proxy office, it’s a starting point for conversations with clients. Any conversation about the metaverse can go in any number of directions — it’s much easier to say, ‘hey, if you click on this link, you can drop in and W-A-S-D yourself around.’”

Initiatives such as Mediahub’s virtual …read more

Source:: Digiday