The Metaverse: The Future of the Internet or a Marketing Campaign?

On 28 October, Facebook renamed its parent company Meta. The Facebook app is still called Facebook, but the company now wants to be known as the builder of the “metaverse”. For two weeks the word has been everywhere: in agency decks, press releases, headlines, and in messages from entrepreneurs asking me whether they “should get into the metaverse too”.

I have ridden enough waves online to recognise the smell of collective excitement. Sometimes it smells like a revolution, sometimes like a marketing campaign. Most of the time it is a bit of both. So I tried to separate what is real from what is packaging, based on what we know today, not on what the slides promise.

Where the word comes from

“Metaverse” is not Mark Zuckerberg’s invention. The term comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash”: a virtual world people enter as avatars to socialise, do business and escape a fairly grim reality. That detail is worth remembering. The metaverse was born as dystopian fiction, not as a business plan.

The idea of a virtual world isn’t new either. Second Life launched in 2003 and already had everything we now hear in pitches: avatars, virtual land, its own currency, brands opening “headquarters” inside it. Many of those who opened virtual shops back then discovered that hardly anyone walked by. That lesson was forgotten quickly.

What was actually announced

Meta says it will invest heavily in this direction. With its quarterly results in October, the company said Reality Labs, the division working on virtual and augmented reality, would reduce this year’s operating profit by around 10 billion dollars. That is real money, not a slide. There are real products too: the Oculus Quest 2 headset, the Horizon Worlds social platform, still in testing, and Horizon Workrooms for meetings in virtual reality.

They are not alone. In early November, Microsoft announced Mesh for Teams, with avatars and virtual spaces for work meetings, scheduled for next year. When two of the biggest players in tech bet in the same direction, you should pay attention. It doesn’t mean they are right, but it does mean they will spend enough to change something.

What is real

Take the buzzword out of the equation and you are left with a few very solid trends we have been watching for years:

• Gaming as a social space. For many teenagers, Roblox, Fortnite or Minecraft are not just games but the place where they hang out with friends. Roblox went public in March this year, and Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert in April 2020 was watched live by millions of people, inside a game.
• The virtual goods economy. People have long paid for skins, digital clothes and in-game items. This year NFTs added the idea of verifiable ownership on the blockchain, and Decentraland and The Sandbox sell plots of virtual land for cryptocurrency.
• Presence at a distance. The pandemic moved our working lives onto screens. Anyone who has spent ten hours a day on video calls knows something is missing: the feeling of being in a room with other people. There is genuine room for innovation here.

I wrote about the NFT and crypto side in more detail this spring, when I asked whether NFTs are art or speculation and looked at how crypto is turning into an asset class. The “decentralised” version of the metaverse rests on exactly those two pillars.

What is marketing

The timing of the rebrand is not a coincidence, or at least I don’t think so. October brought the “Facebook Papers”: internal documents taken out of the company by a former employee and published by a large group of newsrooms, about how the platform handles its effects on teenagers, misinformation and hate speech. Meta says the name change had been planned for a long time. That may be true. But it is hard not to notice that a story about the future helps when the present looks bad in the press.

The second layer of marketing is in the market itself. Agencies are already selling “metaverse strategies” without being able to explain what the client would actually do there on a Monday morning. Virtual land is selling at prices driven more by fear of missing out than by any real use. When a word becomes a sales pitch before it becomes a product, keep your wallet close.

What is missing

For the metaverse in the presentations to become part of ordinary people’s lives, quite a few pieces are still missing:

• Comfortable hardware. Today’s headsets are far better than five years ago, but they are still heavy, they get warm, and you don’t wear one all day. Nobody spends eight hours with a box strapped to their face.
• Interoperability. Your avatar and outfits from Fortnite don’t work in Roblox, and your land in Decentraland doesn’t exist in Horizon. A “metaverse” made of walled gardens is really just a collection of games and apps.
• Reasons for ordinary people to use it. Gamers already have reasons. But why would a retiree enter the metaverse? To buy bread? To talk to the grandchildren? For now, a video call does that more easily.

I am not saying these pieces will never arrive. I am only saying that if they were already here, we wouldn’t need so many presentations to convince us.

What I would tell brands right now

I have been an online entrepreneur since around 2005, and I have learned that arriving too early costs almost as much as arriving too late. So if you run a brand and wonder what to do, this is how I would think about it:

• Experiment small. An augmented reality filter, a collaboration with a Roblox creator or a small collection of digital products will teach you more than a 50-page report. The budget should be one you can lose without regrets.
• Don’t buy expensive virtual land on hype. Land is only worth something if people walk through it. Ask how many real visitors a platform has, not what the last plot sold for.
• Build communities, not scenery. The virtual worlds that work today have one thing in common: people who come back for other people. That holds on Instagram, on Discord and in whatever comes next. It is the same point I made when writing about the creator economy.
• Keep an eye on remote collaboration. If your teams are spread out, tools like Workrooms or Mesh are worth testing. The first practical benefits may well show up here, before entertainment.

So: the future, or a campaign?

My honest answer is: both. The direction is real. We spend more and more time in digital spaces, we pay more and more for things that don’t physically exist, and remote work stayed with us well beyond the first months of the pandemic. But “the metaverse” as a single place where we move our lives is, for now, more a promise and a company name than a product.

The internet ten years from now will probably be more immersive than today’s. I don’t know if it will be called the metaverse. What I do know is that the gap between a good idea and a good business is only crossed by those who solve real problems, not by those who are first to buy the buzzword.

What do you think? Have you already entered a virtual world for something other than play, or does it all look like a well-packaged campaign? And if you run a brand, has anyone pitched you a “metaverse strategy” yet?