A new academic paper on the metaverse explores its role as a tool for digital marketing. It suggests that the metaverse is a new medium for marketing purposes alongside the web, social media, and other digital marketing channels. And it heralds the dawn of a new era of marketing.

The authors have a point. If you turn back the clock on MySpace, online marketing looked very different before the launch of Facebook. It was really about email, SEO, Google Adwords, and banner ads. Today they dominate social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

In case you’re wondering which definition of the metaverse the paper covers, it’s that of virtual reality with a web3 blockchain-based digital economy of land and goods.

The authors suggest that Roblox, Fortnite, and Decentraland could be the metaverse equivalents of Facebook and Twitter. But just like Facebook supplanted MySpace, or Google surpassed AltaVista, we’d argue that Decentraland’s position isn’t rock-solid, and the same goes for everyone else. After all, we’re only scratching the surface of the metaverse’s potential.

What will make the metaverse different from the rise of the virtual world in the mid-2000s, which had considerable hype but failed to catch on? While SecondLife and IMVU have survived, there were many others, including from Google and Sony. The experience was not fundamentally different from Decentraland. Will digital ownership be the key differentiator? Or is it co-creation implicit in decentralized governance?

The short article doesn’t explore other factors that could accelerate adoption, such as the emergence of headphones that allow people to become more immersed. Or the existence of social networks to promote network effects. Or business adoption by large corporations reflecting the pattern of business adoption of personal computers driving consumer interest.

But on the subject of ownership, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT owners have considerable commercial rights. “It would be unthinkable for the Walt Disney Company to allow future generation customers to create, own, and sell merchandise using the images of its characters in the metaverse,” the authors write.

The paper concludes with several avenues for future research. For example, how can the metaverse be used to increase customer engagement? How is metaverse commerce different from e-commerce? And how traditional and metaverse-native companies might want to monetize digital assets differently.