Metaverse—the second lifeline of advertising and marketing!

When this wave of attention to the Metaverse fades, the real opportunity for the Metaverse will not be far away!

Business has a stance, the economy is divided into regions, so advertising and marketing also have hosts and guests, and the rules of play are different in different home courts.

In the past, the main battlefield of advertising and marketing has undergone a transformation from the real economy to the online economy and then to the Internet platform. The real economy is the ecosystem, the online economy is the platform, and Internet software is the tool.

Today, the main battlefield of advertising marketing is gradually shifting from big data AI to blockchain and the metaverse. The metaverse is an ecosystem, blockchain is a platform, and AI is a tool.

The advertising industry is a barometer of the market economy and is an economically dependent industry. Therefore, advertising and marketing itself has no stance. It can only float among different home advantages and rise and fall with the ups and downs of the economy.

With the differentiation and transformation of market business, the two lifelines of the development of the advertising and marketing industry are gradually becoming prominent.

1. The first lifeline of advertising marketing

The first lifeline of advertising marketing starts with the "real economy", takes the "Internet economy" as the midpoint, and ends with the "online and offline integration". As the struggle between the real economy and the Internet economy subsides, the traditional advertising and marketing industry will gradually come to the end of its lifeline.

Over the past twenty years, the main battlefield of advertising and marketing has been online. The characteristics of the online economy are fragmentation, socialization, and digitization, so we can see that the industry sells various marketing solutions such as integrated marketing, digital marketing, and social marketing. The key to the success of these marketing plans lies in how to use Internet tools, such as H5 and AR technology to increase marketing interactivity, and software such as Weibo and WeChat to strengthen brand communication.

Integrated marketing plans are the most expensive, and the advertising industry earns a 30% service fee. Social marketing media costs are the most expensive, and the advertising industry makes money from the media price difference. Digital marketing relies on creativity, so H5, pop-up stores, etc. have been popular before.

Source: Huanqiu.com

Party A and the advertiser only sign a framework contract, and they are paid according to the amount of work done. The case-by-case format makes many colleagues feel insecure!

Nowadays, the main battlefield for advertising and marketing is the Internet platform. There are two reasons why the business stance has shifted from online economy to Internet platform. First, the essence of the Internet is traffic, and BAT occupies more than 80% of the Internet traffic and firmly grasps the right to speak. Second, AI big data has further refined the efficiency of traffic operations, highlighting the monetization capabilities of traffic.

Therefore, the most profitable sector in the advertising and marketing industry in recent years is not planning. Instead, the operational plans and services are formulated based on the resource advantages of large platforms, utilizing the platform's traffic tools and support policies.

The shift from planning to operation on the demand side has brought results that are directly reflected in the evaluation indicators. Whether it is live streaming sales on Douyin or short video agency operations, the data indicators that Party A values ​​are gradually shifting towards ROI rather than influence or dissemination in the era of the "online economy."

However, is there any serious advertising and marketing company that dares to tell you that it guarantees ROI? Internet platforms have squeezed the living space of advertising and marketing service providers, and the industry has long been wailing.

In addition, the entire real economy has no presence, either now or in the past. Discussions on changes in the growth rate of the real economy have been hotly debated over the past decade. With the emergence of various support policies for moving from virtual to real economy in recent years, the real economy has shown a steady upward development trend.

The emergence of the epidemic has made the real economy more difficult, although it has driven the integrated development of the digital economy and the real economy. However, the integration of online and offline has nothing to do with advertising and marketing practitioners.

The so-called integration is divided into two lines. The first is the combination of offline store experience and online traffic, and the second is the transformation of the traditional industry's deep distribution mechanism to BC integration.

The integration of offline store experience and online live streaming is dominated by Internet platforms. With "traffic is king" as the underlying logic, following the pyramid profit distribution network of "Internet platform-content service provider-advertising planning service provider-product service" and the value chain of "traffic-operation-planning-service-product", no matter which one, physical merchants are still at the lowest level.

If physical merchants want to obtain traffic, they not only need good products and good services, but also content planning and traffic operation capabilities. Therefore, they have to purchase the operating services of middlemen - but this does not belong to traditional advertising marketing, but is the business scope of Douyin DP service providers.

The physical industry has a self-sufficient marketing strategy - deep distribution. Similar to the Internet platform, deep distribution adopts a pyramid network of "manufacturer-distributor-second-tier dealer-terminal-consumer" in building its marketing network, following the value chain of "product-channel-consumer".

Source: Mido Big Data Engine

The so-called BC integration refers to a deep distribution model led by brands under the empowerment of the digital economy. Brand owners rely on second-tier dealers and terminals to collect consumer data and provide feedback to manufacturers to produce products or optimize existing products - this is exactly how new consumer brands play.

The new consumer industry relies on new media and offline stores as data terminals, and uses the content production capabilities of KOC and KOL to connect both ends of online and offline traffic. If BC integration can be truly implemented, then the Internet economy and the real economy can achieve balanced development and mutual restraint.

However, this also marks the end of the first lifeline of advertising and marketing.

Internet platforms can sell advertising resources directly to brands and rely on service providers to drive commercialization. For the physical industry, directly hiring media buyers and traffic pitchers is obviously more cost-effective.

2. The second lifeline of advertising marketing

At the end of the year, the Internet industry ushered in another wave of year-end layoffs. Although most of the layoffs are part of normal structural optimization, considering the overall background of the decline in Internet advertising and marketing revenue last year, people are still worried.

Tencent held its 2021 Tencent Employee Conference a few days ago, and the information revealed seemed to verify people's concerns. Ma Huateng constantly reminds employees that the Internet's cold winter is coming and they should be prepared to survive it. In response to Ma Huateng's negative statement, Zhang Xiaolong even hinted at the possibility of layoffs in the future.

In the physical consumer industry, sales of many new consumer brands have declined year-on-year since August, and some have even been halved. The spearhead is directed at the rising traffic costs and the decreasing ROI. Brands have to admit that the money spent on online marketing can only bring temporary popularity and sales, but cannot earn them brands and users.

Traditional catering brands, mainly Haidilao, also recently announced that they will gradually close about 300 stores that are not performing up to expectations before December 31 this year. Earlier, Xiabu Xiabu founder and chairman He Guangqi also said in an interview with the media that he had decided to close 200 loss-making Xiabu Xiabu stores.

The Internet has entered a cold winter and the real economy is not doing well either. So the question is, which industry’s money should the advertising and marketing industry make?

Everyone should pay attention to two companies, one of which is the local integrated marketing company XuanYa International. Recently, XuanYa International stated that the company has actively responded to the Xinhua News Agency Metaverse Joint Innovation Center plan, and has explored in depth the deep integration of 5G integrated media platforms and products with corporate digital platforms, striving to build the "Live Cloud Enterprise Edition" into a super portal for the "Enterprise Metaverse" scenario.

The second is the media company Tianxiaxiu, which launched a 3D virtual social product based on blockchain technology - Honnverse. The landing page of Rainbow Universe received more than 100,000 reservations within one day. Tianxiaxiu believes that Rainbow Universe can help the creator economy enter the social 4.0 era.

Source: Metaverse

Metaverse concept stocks have become the hottest commodity in the investment market, with two leading companies in the local advertising industry taking the lead. Although there is suspicion of cutting leeks, it still illustrates a truth: at least on the capital market side, the Metaverse is becoming the next "money-making" home ground for the advertising and marketing industry.

On December 2, Balenciaga, a French luxury brand under Kering Group, officially announced the establishment of an independent Metaverse team dedicated to exploring economic opportunities in the untapped digital field of Metaverse.

Cédric Charbit, CEO of Balenciaga, said, "Right now, the mainstream way to interact with luxury brands is to like, comment or buy things, and I think we can go to the next level." Previously, Balenciaga presented its 2021 autumn and winter series for the first time in the form of a video game called "Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow", which is also the fashion industry's closest exploration of the concept of the metaverse.

Although new consumer brands do not have the advantages of supply chain and offline channels of traditional brands, their creativity in online marketing and ability to quickly capture trends should not be underestimated.

On its 6th anniversary on December 7, Nayuki (02150.HK) officially announced NAYUKI as its first brand ambassador and introduced that she is "infinitely approaching the unknown universe." At the same time, 300 NAYUKI's NFT digital art works and 1,000 sets of NAYUKI trendy toys limited to the world were launched and sold in the form of blind boxes.

This also means that Naixue is targeting the four major consumer trends: metaverse, NFT, blind boxes, and trendy toys. According to data, as of November this year, Nayuki's Tea has opened more than 700 stores in more than 80 cities around the world, and its expansion ambitions are considerable.

There is no doubt that, whether from the capital market to corporate development, the balance of business is tilting towards the metaverse.

The underlying foundation of Internet technology is information processing technology, which enables information to spread faster and human communication to become closer. The virtual reality technology represented by the metaverse will digitize human feelings and experiences, allowing humans to achieve "zero-distance contact" in the virtual world.

Therefore, it does not make sense for Ma Huateng to believe that the full-fledged Internet (metaverse) is the next ticket to the development of mobile Internet.

Analogous to the development of the Internet, with the development of virtual reality technology, the metaverse will build another Internet ecosystem, and blockchain will support a series of economic systems such as payment, while AI digital tools will bring more differentiated experiences to users' senses like software source code.

The booming development of the Internet in the past 20 years has brought the real economy from offline to online. Now that the Internet economy has come to an end, they are beginning to merge again. After being empowered by blockchain and VR technology enhancing the sense of immersion, the real economy has begun to counterattack in the form of the metaverse.

There is no doubt that new economies will emerge in the simulated world created by the metaverse. As a subsidiary industry of economic development, advertising and marketing will naturally usher in another lifeline as the main field shifts.

Jon Radoff, founder of the development tool company Beamable, summarizes the seven elements of the metaverse

3. Summary and Thoughts

According to Gartner's technology maturity curve, the Metaverse is still in the first rising period of attention bubble stage. But the author believes that referring to the development of the Internet, the development of virtual reality technology may be faster than that of information technology.

In 2021, my country will continue to introduce policies to guide and support the development of blockchain-related technologies. In March of this year, "blockchain" was included in the national five-year plan for the first time in the "14th Five-Year Plan" and was clearly listed as a key industry of the digital economy. This is good news for the metaverse industry that relies on blockchain technology.

Although the Metaverse still has shortcomings in hardware and applications, with favorable policies promoting technological development and an increasing number of technology giants declaring their participation in the industry, the development of the Metaverse industry will have a stronger driving force in the future.

When this wave of attention to the Metaverse fades, the real opportunities for the Metaverse will not be far away.

Author: Community Marketing Research Institute

Source: Community Marketing Research Institute