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As I write this, I’m listening to Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” album, sipping my favorite matcha green tea, and bathed in the glow of tiny tinsel tree lights reflecting off a bay window. There are so many things I want to thank him for this holiday season. So are you reading this!
Besides the fact that people with internet access are wealthier than 99% of the rest of the world’s population, there are many other reasons to feel hopeful as the New Year approaches. No, really — there is. I’m here today to help your grumpy heart grow three sizes her size.
So, in the spirit of the holiday season, we’ve created a list of the immersive marketing trends you can expect in 2023 (fun, if not optimistic). We hope this approach will help you enter the New Year with humor and gratitude. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
Without further ado, here’s our countdown to 10 Reasons Marketers Can Be Optimistic in 2023. In the words of David Letterman. (If he’s too young to remember Letterman’s nightly top 10 list, watch a great example on YouTube and stay up to date with us old folks.)
If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m passionate about innovative B2B marketing.
2022 feels like ushering in a new, exploratory era for B2B marketing. Businesses will begin to better understand how to leverage immersive media to achieve business goals and solve customer pain points at the same time. I hope more companies will adopt the three use cases I described in my recent article.
- event.
- learning and education.
- networking.
All are essential to reaching and influencing B2B audiences, and now the strategic use of immersive technology allows us to scale our efforts exponentially.
9. No more dauntingly passive (and boring) virtual events
Speaking of events, we can’t wait to see marketers adopt a truly interactive and immersive platform for virtual and hybrid events. If event attendees are expected to sit and watch something from their homes, then they are doing something wrong.
Ironically, I was recently on a dog walk outlining one of my top trends for 2023: the need to move audiences from passive participants to active participants. I just heard a great webinar.
So the question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘How can we provide virtual event attendees with things to do and ways to participate while still offering a ‘choose your own adventure’ approach? ”
Augmented Reality (XR) solves this problem nicely. Check out this recent MarTech article on how to use XR for events in 2023 and beyond.
8. Beautiful (but empty) virtual space
2023 will continue to see a proliferation of new metaverse-inspired artistic platforms that enable artists and 3D content creators to build their own worlds. Examples of these types of spaces are Monaverse, Room, OnCyber, etc.
Many of these platforms boast active communities of virtual inhabitants. However, upon closer inspection, most of the featured spaces have no real life.
One of the least fun things to do is to walk yourself through an amazingly beautifully constructed virtual space. A key benefit of connected immersive spaces is the ability to join the space together with anyone from anywhere in the world.
7. Real-time user-generated 360-degree streaming video becomes a thing
The adoption of 5G will spur an increase in real-time, immersive video content streaming. Get ready to watch your friend’s grandmother’s 100th birthday in full swing on 360-degree streaming video.
6. You no longer need to connect your crypto wallet to access blockchain-powered virtual worlds — Hallelujah!
Anyone who has tried to explore virtual worlds powered by Ethereum will understand my pain with this. Creating crypto wallets and connecting them to accounts in virtual worlds is a huge headache and creates enough friction for many potential users to bail out.NFT-centric virtual spaces pivot to keep users back There are many other reasons why we continue to see headlines like ‘NFTs drop as speculators pull back after hype’.
5. Brands will stop forcing virtual world explorers to adopt poor avatars shaped like paperclips and wobble wobbles — Double Hallelujah!
Hopefully, 2023 will be the year marketers realize the importance of avatars. Of course, they are our own representatives. The way we express ourselves through our avatars is deeply rooted in our subconscious and tied to the infamous reptilian brain that drives all purchasing decisions.
It’s a stupid marketing decision to force viewers to live inside the bodies of crappy avatars.And what you consider a suitable and even likeable avatar is probably No Suitable or desirable from the perspective of the target audience. Trying to make something that looks cool to children is often the kiss of death.
A better approach would be to take the risk and allow the community to bring their own avatars via integration with Ready Player Me, or provide robust tools that allow the community to customize their own.
4. No more having to show someone’s stock image on your head-mounted display.
Yes, I’m taking a page from Joan Crawford’s book on this. I hate this overused, almost always completely irrelevant image of someone wearing a VR headset.Spoiler alert — we won’t In the future, we will be walking around with a VR headset on our face.
We will find more comfortable and intuitive ways to access immersive content while going about our daily lives. This might look like eyewear, or something we haven’t even imagined yet.
Ha. This makes my heart a little sad. Epic’s failure in the metaverse hurt us all. I sincerely hope that some of my articles on marketing in the metaverse will help prevent these kinds of accidents.
A recent example, the EU’s $400,000 foray into the metaverse, was declared a failure by many media outlets, including a Yahoo Finance article that said virtually no one attended the online event. The billions of dollars of developing a standalone platform would have been better spent doing something useful for the world. I can’t say I’m fundamentally against that view, but try drawing a silver lining.
The event space was created by one of the best immersive agencies, Journee (hence the steep price tag). It was beautiful, easy to navigate, and had lots of interesting features. Just months before the EU event, I attended a similar event created by Journee. It was a huge success, attracting a large number of attendees and ushering in the future of virtual events.
The EU may have made some mistakes, but I hope that the lessons learned from this project will encourage better campaigns in the future. I always say that we learn far more from our mistakes.
2. No one is cool enough to go to school in 2023
As a lifelong student, I am very happy about this. There are more valuable online immersive marketing programs available for marketers and communicators looking to create innovative and effective campaigns.
You can take a look at some of the online educational resources that exist today in my article on becoming a master of metaverse marketing. In addition to the ones I have outlined, new programs are being developed that focus solely on immersive communication and strategy, like this newly launched remote program from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications. Spoiler alert: I am teaching in this program and I couldn’t be more excited!)
1. Great news – Instagram’s conceited, superficial, perfect-looking influencers don’t exist
That is correct. Virtual influencers will rise in 2023 as brands continue to love the idea of not having to deal with the demands and bad behavior of a real person. We love the idea that companies can now leverage AI-driven virtual avatars to shamelessly wear and promote their products. leverages completely fictitious virtual influencers.
An interesting study conducted this year concluded that consumers’ relationship to virtual media personas is not significantly different from how they respond to influencers who are real people.
obvious! This is what I have been preaching for years and who cares if your digital his boyfriend is real. Hopefully, this new era of virtual influencers will help remove the stigma that still lingers on building meaningful relationships solely through digital technology, whether it’s AI-driven or not.
You can learn more about this trend at virtualhumans.org, a platform that tracks the activity of virtual influencers around the world.
Bonus Trends for 2023: Peace, Joy and Love
May more marketers wake up to the role that technology and nature play in shaping a sustainable digital universe where they not only coexist but thrive.
And since it’s a public holiday today, my gift to you, my dear reader, is this extra special bonus. My heartfelt wish for 2023 is for marketers around the world to wake up to the fact that: we are responsible To create the world we all want.
We all need to become informed digital citizens, better understand our relationship with technology, and advocate for the well-being, safety and freedom of our viewers in our digital world.
You can learn more and be a part of this mission by reading my manifesto and attending the monthly XR for Marketing and Communications Pub Crawl that resumes in the new year. In the meantime, have a nice vacation everyone. And good night everyone!
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
About the author
Lisa Peyton is an immersive media strategist and media psychologist focused on user engagement and marketing applications of new technologies.
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