The Brief
Convince 10+ brands to participate in a 5-day virtual event and create a shared world in which each can tell a story worth playing.
The Challenge
The Metaverse was a risky investment for any brand at the time. We couldn’t promise specific metrics or more than a few successful case studies. Besides, in 2024, before Unity was introduced, it didn’t exactly look like an AAA game.
We had to convince Lush, Neutrogena, Lottie London, Glossybox and others to show up, otherwise we would have no MBW. Each brand came with a unique problem to solve, and we have to create different containers to solve them.
Solution
We’ve studied the existing community behaviours and wants on each of the platforms and found workable, platform-agnostic aspirations: togetherness in the moment that will never be the same and showable artefacts from that moment.
With that in mind, we designed brand experiences with the organic community in mind and oftentimes in collaboration with that community, while avoiding the seductive brand opportunism and label hijacking.
Creators economy was also a massive driver of traffic. To introduce value, we collaborated with prominent XR and Metaverse creators for a series of useful creator tutorials.
And, of course, free skins.
The Metaverse was a fleeting phenomenon, like many other new shiny things with billion-dollar market projections. Yet, in my work, every human truth I’ve unearthed outlasted an emerging tech trend or cultural shift that revealed it.
People came to MBW for free skins and to avoid the FOMO, but what kind of creative is happy to stop there?