R.I.P. Omnichannel Marketing — Long Live Omniverse Marketing

It’s going to be really funny watching marketers and agencies completely f*ck up their #metaverse campaigns because they think people will behave the same as they do offline.

If you look at the marketing and advertising industry, it’s been split into online and offline marketing already — but this is NOT the same thing.

Offline and Online Marketing

Offline marketing is any marketing that is not done through the internet. This encompasses various mediums and formats, from TV and radio commercials to billboards and print ads.

Online marketing communicates to customers through e-mails, chat, and social media, for example.

People are tracked through their interactions with QR codes, offers and discount vouchers, and even loyalty schemes.

The Metaverse

But the metaverse is far beyond that simple definition. The metaverse represents another world for people to interact with but is as immersive as the physical one, and as such, will present people with the opportunity to behave in ways completely contrary to themselves.

As a result, it’s going to present an entirely different set of behavioral data you’ll need to think about very quickly. And with the attention firmly on the ability of users to retain some data sovereignty and control online, that data might start becoming harder to get hold of.

If you think you’ve cracked omnichannel marketing in this brave new world, you’re sadly mistaken.

Who a person is and how they behave in person will be an entirely different proposition to how they behave “in-avatar” interacting in a virtualized 3D environment. Marketers will make a huge mistake in thinking that they understand their customer’s psyche because they’ve already collected enough data on their habits in the real world.

We’re aware of it ourselves when we play open-world video games that allow us the freedom to be who we want to be — many of us want that escape, and so expecting customers not to take advantage of the opportunity to express themselves differently will cost marketers dearly.

Why would you send me offers based on my propensities as I shop and spend physically to my online persona where I may want to separate those lives and spend and behave in a manner that suits the worlds I want to inhabit?

Take Disney, for example — they know that when you enter a theme park you’re going to behave differently than if you were just out shopping for clothes or dinner because it’s an escape. A metaverse or #web3 experience will be no different.

And don’t get me started on having to think about loyalty schemes in completely different dimensions too, because those too just won’t translate the same way either.

We’re now going to have to think of marketing beyond just omnichannel and think ‘omniverse’, and I’m not sure you’re going to be prepared for just how customers will behave so differently in either.

Also published here