The Metaverse could help reinvent advertising - or prove very inhospitable

If video games are any guide, it won't be easy for brands

When Facebook was plotting its name change centered around its would-be Metaverse, I was talking to a company that had actually already built one.

On Wednesday I got to chat with Roblox’s VP of brand partnerships Chistina Wootten about how close to 50 million people each day log on, play games, make games and use entirely digital personas to hang out with friends all over the world.

I’d love to say the timing was deliberate – Zuckerberg is about to drop Meta just as I’m talking to someone who’s living it, but alas we were recording the interview ( for the podcast I host - Next in Marketing)- in part because Roblox was about to unveil a new digital Chipotle within its world, just in time for a Halloween promotion.

Our conversation about that partnership, coinciding with Zuckerberg’s monstrously ambitious mission, made with think about the future of advertising if we do indeed all start living digital lives in some kind of metaverse or multiple metaverses.

What advertising is will likely have to be completely reinvented - or get much, much harder to execute well.

“We really want to make sure that everything on Roblox, if a brand comes on it’s benefitting the experience or the user.” said Wootten.

That is a very high bar for an ad.

That idea that ads can’t just exist, but have to make an experience better- has also been a manta for any sort of video game or virtual world ad execution for a long time. The attitude toward ads in video games has been, this medium is really different. These experiences are personal and highly immersed. You simply can’t just interrupt or target.

In this case, the Chipotle/Roblox partnership is super clever and fun. Users put on a virtual costume – like Guacenstein – and enter the meta-Chipotle. The first 30,000 get a free burrito in real life.

So not only does Chipotle get cool fun branding among a young audience, but it should drive traffic in-store and get more people to download the company’s app (and share some data)

Here’s the catch.

Wootten told me these kinds of partnerships involve lots of people within different departments on the brand side and can take four to six months. Because you are literally building something new (like a game). Then you also have to make sure that players in Roblox know there’s a Chipotle and how to get there.

All doable - but complicated.

Yes, there are easier, more entry-level ways for brands to tap into Roblox – brands can roll out virtual items in a few weeks. And I’m not knocking the partnership at all. It’s so early in this form of advertising that it’s not surprising that it’s complicated and slow-moving.

And as Wootten noted, early social media ad campaigns took lots of decision-makers, and brands and agencies had to build know-how and processes and stand-alone teams.
Then of course, social ads became native and could be purchased using self-serve tools and soon scaled like crazy.

Here's where I wonder if Zuck knows what he’s getting into. if video games are any guide, advertising is going to be a slog. I remember over a decade ago covering all these startups promising to bring scale to gaming ads, and analysts predicting billions in spending, and instead, we got a series of one-offs and very limited opportunities.

And even as I read about the grand vision that has all of us living and doing work in metaverses, these would be Metas still look, feel. and sound feel like really cool video games. That don’t sound likes places where it’s going to be easy to run tons of standard ads.

There’s a big difference here that is worth pointing out between games and metaverses– most video game companies didn’t need advertising. Titles like Halo made millions without it. Monster hits Fortnite, which is free, could take or leave it. (I’m excluding mobile games, which thrive on ads but are far more casual than metaveresey)

What’s the business model for the Metaverse gonna be? Roblox has its own currency. Way before people were buying NFTs, players were buying skins and features in Roblox and Fortnite, among others (to be fair, these were children, not 35-year-old men who want to brag about having your very own clip of Steph Curry that I could just watch on YouTube whenever or a fake panda or whatever you dorks are up to).

Meanwhile, Facebook is a company of 10 million advertisers. All they do is sell ads. Are these small and mid-sized brands all going to build virtual storefronts, where they sell real or fake things?

Look, I’m totally rooting for this category conceptually. Advertisers have to figure out gaming, no matter what.

I may be shortchanging everyone’s creativity here. Maybe the metaverse is much more about services or commerce, or a yet-to-be-launched whiz-bang, incredibly visual form of advertising that is so revolutionary that we just can’t conceive of it yet. Maybe whichever tech companies succeeding in building worlds that really catch on figure out a way to make ads part of their fabric (like TV or magazines) instead of unwelcome intruders.

I really hope so.

Because I also remember getting sent a lot of custom branded virtual experiences that marketers made specifically for virtual reality devices just a few short years ago. I never went back more than once, and I don’t think too many brands did either.