It’s easy to envision advertising having a place in the metaverse, but what if advertising reinforces the metaverse? For many years, companies across the digital ecosystem have worked toward the goal of relevant, meaningful ads served to the precise customer at the right moment. Ad tech has been chipping away at this project since the magazine advertorial and TV infomercials, with more recent examples including AdWords, native ads, and the recommendation engines on Amazon and Netflix. As the metaverse grows and advertising looks to find its place within, there are three key areas of opportunity to leverage toward reaching the goal of serving meaningful content and ads to consumers.
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Complementary Content
Web3 is a distributed content system whereby rational individuals — content creators and consumers — will act in their self-interest with the help of blockchain technology. With Web3, NFTs are distributed through the network with the promise to solve intellectual property problems, transaction security, and other details of authenticated digital infrastructure. Blockchain technology allows any piece of intellectual property to be publicly codified along with its ownership in an omnipresent, distributed cloud of computer networks. Against this backdrop, creators will be highly motivated and free to create their best work as any use of it can be monitored and monetized. As a result, consumers should flock to this high-quality content. With the engaged parties’ exchange of value, a tremendous opportunity exists to optimize content and behaviors.
A recent articleOpens a new window in the New York Times sheds some light on how this could work: “For decades, artists, musicians and other creators have struggled with the fact that, on the internet, making copies of any digital artifact is trivially easy. Scarcity, the quality that gives offline art its value, was hard to replicate online because anyone who downloaded a file could copy and paste it an infinite number of times, with no loss in quality. Blockchain technology changed that by making it possible to stamp digital goods with a cryptographic marker of authenticity and keep a permanent record of its ownership.†This could also help de-position social media platforms as the dominant force in content distribution.
It seems inevitable that the future infrastructure of the open internet will involve NFTs and blockchain as part of the fundamental data architecture, which means that content providers and consumers will be compelled to adapt. Any place where consumers interact with content will necessarily involve advertising. The future of advertising in Web3 promises to be more efficient and transparent than ever before, solving many of the problems that plague the industry today.
Attribution
One of the core features of Web3 is the ability to attribute value that is derived far down the value chain. This backbone will create a profound opportunity for brands and advertisers to efficiently manage their campaigns and messages while preserving real transparency for all parties.
The current attribution problem is that media consumption occurs in different spaces on top of data from disparate systems. The ability to track where the content originated and who consumes it are core to Web3. The third piece of the problem — determining the consumer’s next actions — should be well-established in the basic architecture, providing advertisers with a near-perfect attribution backdrop to tune their messages to drive outcomes.Â
Security and Identity
Identity management will also be a critical aspect of this reconfigured market. Web3 must solve the cookie-based modal problem the industry has created on Web2.0. Web3 ads will be able to build on whatever technology, protocols, and controls are put in place for identity management, which should allow players to collect and easily build up their own personal content and data libraries. In Web3, managing who you are (whatever scenario you want) is in your interest and should eventually become intuitive and frictionless.
Consumer identity as established by the blockchain can ensure control of personal data shared with third parties. By establishing a core mechanism for sharing information in a way that’s transparent and universal across stakeholders and data exchanges, various parties in the marketing ecosystem can verify essential elements of attribution without sharing truly sensitive or regulated information.
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The Opportunity Is Here
Web3 inherently won’t solve all of our digital problems. But it does represent a strong call to action for entrepreneurs and forward-thinkers to start putting the pieces in place to reinforce the experience for all players in the new web.
Between blockchain technology, the metaverse, and accelerating digital transformation in the wake of the global pandemic, the advertising industry stands at the precipice of a profoundly new era of efficiency. Everything that made Web2 dysfunctional, from its perverse economic incentives to the lack of accountability across the digital ecosystem, is up for reinvention and reimagining. Web3, built on blockchain technology and likely destined to undergird the future metaverse, should provide sustained value and benefit to all parties in the digital economy. It will be a welcome development, as much of what we do is overdue for reconsideration.
How do you intend to leverage the growth of Web3 and metaverse in your advertising efforts? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .