Advertising in the Metaverse: Research Agenda

Metaverse is a term that has been gaining traction in the tech world since 2020. The term metaverse, a threedimensional virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people—and coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash (1992)—became one of the hottest tech terms in 2021. In fact, a Google Trends search shows the term has been actively searched since early 2021, starting around the time when Roblox went public on March 10, then when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in April that the company’s next step was to create a metaverse (Shapiro 2021), and when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his decision to rebrand the company with a new name, Meta, on October 28. Zuckerberg also stated the change would come with a new logo (an infinity sign) and even a new stock ticker, MVRS (Kelly 2021). Some critics say that the metaverse is a vague concept or simply “the feel-good place of the exciting future” created by tech giants without enough applications of it that are useful to users (WORT 89.9FM Madison 2021), or that it is simply a fantasy world created by the powers that be to control our lives and drive us to the “black hole of consumption” (Bogost 2021). Many others, however, believe the metaverse is not a buzzword but an evolution that is already under way (Lee 2021). In fact, the metaverse is not a new concept that tech companies are just now beginning to actively consider. The Metaverse Roadmap, published in 2007 (Smart, Cascio, and Paffendorf 2007), predicted that the Internet in the 10 years that followed would see “an all-encompassing digital playground where people will be immersed in an always-on flood of digital information, whether wandering through physical spaces or diving into virtual worlds” (Terdiman 2007). The prediction was not simply fantasy but based on the emerging technologies that were already being developed. The Metaverse Roadmap team in 2007 identified the four main scenarios of the metaversal world: augmented reality, lifelogging, virtual worlds, and mirror worlds. In less than 15 years, leading tech companies now see the opportunities to mix those scenarios and create a world beyond the real world: the metaverse. As it is just now beginning to be realized, no one can clearly foretell what the metaverse, considered as Web 3.0 (Cook et al. 2020), will be like in the future. But it is believed to be true that the metaverse is very near or is already here (in its primitive form) to stay with us and evolve in ways we may not be able to see now. Many leading tech firms are jumping on the metaverse trend. Nvidia Omniverse, Facebook Horizon, Microsoft’s enterprise metaverse, to name a few, are leading the wave. Consumer brands such as Gucci and Coca-Cola are selling their nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in metaverse platforms, such as Decentraland. We are already witnessing the formation of the metaverse ecosystem where multiple players, small and large, help one another create a second world simulating the real world (Caulfield 2021). According to Newzoo’s 2021 Global Games Market Report, the players in the metaverse ecosystem include metaverse gateways that provide platforms and content (e.g., Roblox, Zepeto, Fortnite, Sandbox, and Decentraland), feature providers (e.g., avatar tech [e.g., Tafi], social media, user interface and immersion [e.g., Oculus], and economy [e.g., Coinbase]), and infrastructure (e.g., cloud, artificial intelligence, ad tech, and connectivity). These players can be subsegmented based on who creates the content and whether the experience is centralized (e.g., Fortnite) or decentralized (e.g., Decentraland). As the Internet cannot be owned by one company, the metaverse cannot be owned by one corporation or just a few tech giants (Brown 2021). Though many consider the metaverse as the next web, that is Web 3.0 or the Spatial Web (Cook et al. 2020), which might fundamentally change the way we interact with the digital world (Austin 2021), there is no clear consensus yet on how the metaverse should be defined or described because of its complexity (Smart, Cascio, and Paffendorf 2007). Some define it as (1) “a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the analog one in which we live” (Herrman and Browning 2021), a reimagined version of the OASIS in Ready Player One (Cline 2011); (2) “a massive virtual world where millions of people—or their avatars—will interact in real time”