PR in the metaverse — have you all lost your fucking minds…?
The PR industry is no stranger to bad press. Often considered the ugly sister of marketing, budgets are first to be cut, teams are first to be blamed, and nothing is ever enough. Deliver an amazing campaign and you’ve done your job well. Not deliver enough and you ought to resign. To work in this industry, you need to be comfortable with an often thankless pursuit, and to lean into the perks.
It would be a shame for the PR industry not to jump on the latest trend, especially when it’s often our job to know just enough about a new platform to be able to articulate it in 280 characters or less.
Twitter parody accounts, hosting on Clubhouse, a Podcast on mental health fronted by a well known female celebrity, Instagram gifs and more recently, removing all social media accounts, presumably to cut marketing spend but packaged up as a statement for the politically inflamed activist Gen Z’s, have all slid their way into DIY PR decks. And that’s before we’ve even suggested you can pay your monthly retainer in cryptocurrency.
Given that NFT’s are now considered cliche, we look to a new forum to find additional ways to encourage clients to part with their precious budgets. In an industry where clients think the only metric for PR is ‘eyeballs,’ a fabulously vague and intangible reporting cadence, what better way than to breathe confidence into the lifeless structure than to suggest campaigns, not online, not IRL, but in an imaginary parallel universe. Bloomberg analysts are even more bullish, predicting the market may reach $783.3 billion in 2024.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, failed to change the subject, so decided to change his company, announcing last year that Facebook was rebranding to Meta, in a bid, most likely, to shed the negative connotations and attention that FB had garnered in the preceding years. Explaining the new name in a letter he posted online, Zuckerberg wrote that he envisions “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it… like you are right there with another person or in another place… able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends or in your parents’ living room to catch up.” A true fusion of reality and imagination, bringing real life experiences into a digital frame. In Zuckerberg’s metaverse, many physical objects in the real world, as well as people’s family members, friends and coworkers, would be replaced by cartoon holograms viewed through virtual-reality goggles. So we can now all live in our real life video game fantasy.
VR is not a new concept, but with VR, the user is able to clearly tell the differentiate between the world they are seeing through augmented reality, and the one in which they actually exist in. In the metaverse, the idea is that those two worlds collide.
Nike has already started filing trademark applications for virtual goods. Ariana Grande hosted a concert for which you had to buy a ticket, and some absolute mug paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg’s neighbour in the metaverse. Do you know how hard it is to convince a client of the value of appearing as number 36 on a list of 40 bikini’s in an online gallery? Even if it is part of an attrition based strategy that ladders up to something more compelling. Imagine trying to convince them of the same thing, but in an imaginary world, with imaginary people who look like cartoons, writing for imaginary magazines? “We dressed Marge Simpson for a party at OJ’s house on the street that Kim Kardashian lives on, and everyone paid in NFT’s that were reassigned to art work that was created by Simon Cowell’s 4 year old son. We would consider that completion of our quarterly KPI’s.”
I have made a career out of finding great stories, embellishing average ones, and creating expensive distractions for those that don’t have one at all, so I’m not knocking the idea of a new space in which progressive forms of communication can exist. Every metaverse environment will be culturally specific, nuanced and immersive, creating opportunities for varied means of communication. Having said that, have we all lost our fucking minds? Are we all so disgusted by our current reality, that we want to seek a purer, curated and perfect version of real life? We are already facing a mental health epidemic, largely fuelled by loneliness, mistrust and isolation, enhanced by the ridiculous standards set by imaginary people on social media sharing hyperbolic and often false content, that now we want to project an imaginary space in which you can charge money for things that don’t exist, have conversations with people who aren’t real, and live in houses that you’ll never step foot in.
Aside from the desire for such extreme escapism being a depressing comment on the perceived quality of life for Gen Z + Millennials (those most engaged with the metaverse), this overblown hysteria about the metaverse is a destabilising emperors new clothes for consumer brands. There are already some examples of successful influencer marketing in these virtual worlds, and there’s real promise in the near future. For example, the Metafluence platform, self-described as “the only platform where influencers can share their lifestyle, engage with their audience, collect and trade digital artwork (NFTs) and collaborate with advertisers in the metaverse.” However, from a PR perspective, this translates as an echo chamber of old ideas with new branding. The very nature of PR, is to connect brands with their consumers, share their ideas, create stories, experiences, feelings, emotions and ideas, to inflame, to excite, to challenge and to champion. In a world which craves so desperately real communication, touch, feel, body language, positive energy, comfort and love, I find that suggestions of dismantling that for virtual experiences is at best idealistic and at worst destructive.
Eric Peckham, TechCrunch, comments; ‘In 10 years, we will have undergone a paradigm shift in social media and human-computer interaction, moving away from 2D apps centered on posting content toward shared feeds and an era where mixed reality (viewed with lightweight headsets) mixes virtual and physical worlds. But we’re not technologically or culturally ready for that future yet. The “metaverse” of science fiction is not arriving imminently.’
Are we really blindly following a new world designed specifically for escapism, with our eyes wide open? Are you going to spend £5000 on your dream holiday, to experience it from your sitting room…? Are you willing to construct an entire life, experience relationships and put down roots somewhere that dies without a good internet connection? Whilst there is a lot to be explored in the metaverse for important training opportunities, learning systems, and creativity, this isn’t something that needs to be added to a pitch deck just yet. The yawning gap between the overblown aspirations for the metaverse and the reality of its current structure, mean that this is arguably louder than it is compelling. A feat that aptly parallels the collision of traits for Meta’s CEO, on and offline.
