Advertising Guest Columns
3 mins read

Is Metaverse Advertising the Next Big Thing?

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The Fortnite-based Travis Scott’s online concert in April 2021 brought together over 10 million virtual attendees. And this huge audience can and should be monetized. Such an idea lies at the core of metaverse advertising, which as many experts agree, is one of the most vivid emerging online ad trends for 2022.

If CTV was one of the hottest buzzwords in digital advertising in 2019 and 2020, 2021 was all about the metaverse. Even though this concept (also known as multiverse) isn’t in fact brand-new, it has obtained a massive boost of popularity among online businesses, mostly due to Mr. Zuckerberg’s forecasts for the future of Facebook (now: Meta).

Nonetheless, as many analysts predict, the upcoming 12 months of metaverse won’t be centered solely around one company, but rather a wide array of businesses, including Microsoft and Google, to name a few, willing to join the competition for the relevant audience engagement. And where there’s engagement, there’s monetization.

The Dawn of the Metaverse Era

In this respect, even though metaverse advertising is still in its infancy, global brands have already turned their focus to this brand-new market niche, clearly eyeing colossal potential. In plain English, what metaverse is promising advertisers is their exclusive access to premium customers who primarily value innovation and are already building out the basis of the future global economy.

And where there’s growing hunger for innovation, even more investor’s money will inevitably be flowing, headstarting the new era of people’s second-life evolution in the augmented, mixed and 100% virtual realities.

The Story is Yet to Unfold

While the prerequisites for the rapid development of the newly-emerging metaverse advertising niche are absolutely solid, so is the sad truth that this rapid development is yet to begin.

If only we could skip the whole pandemic crisis and fast forward the global adoption of 5G (as many experts once predicted to become the hottest trend for 2019), the market would have been crowded with VR hardware options of varied price and functionality by now.

But there comes the pragmatic realities of the slowed-down implementation of 5G infrastructure, combined with the global supply chain issues in tech core production and spiced up with the growing concerns over the current lack of metaverse regulations.

And the vision of the forecasted evolution is gradually fading. The truth is, however, it’s pausing, it’s just slowing down.

Paying Attention to the Q1 & Q2 2022 News

Whatever the tech-related issues currently include (i.e. issues with connection speed, interoperability and lack of VR device variety across regional markets), brands have been already exploring and testing available advertising capabilities in the new metaverse environments. And their interest isn’t going anywhere.

In this respect, the success of already launched collaborations in the automotive vertical (e.g NASCAR x Roblox) are only proving this point.

Add it to the continuous development of metaverse-related SaaS solutions, including the relevant advertising tech, and we may easily be starting to see multiple product launches in the niche in Q2 2022.

And where there’s tech innovation, as we remember, even more investors’ money will follow.

We’ll just have to stay tuned.

A.Liaskovskyi
CEO, AdPlayer.Pro

Founded in 2016, AdPlayer.Pro provides publishers, brand advertisers & agencies with an ecosystem of advanced outstream video advertising solutions, powered by a robust ad-enabled video player technology. For more information, please visit adplayer.pro