It was his first time. They, the executives of the main multinationals in the region, had a week of exhibitions related to new digital trends. But what surprised them the most was a conference related to the concept of the “Metaverse” and the way in which everything can change in the link with the consumer. “Many large companies are already modifying their investment ‘marketing mix’, both online and offline. And they allocate more and more resources to these digital platforms. The challenge now goes through monetization”, explains one of the participants of that course.
The movement is constant. And it forces the corporate world to change its paradigms. This implies that they must move in the ambiguity of the so-called “O2O”, aiming at the “omnichannel”. “A product can be purchased both in the physical world and in the digital world,” adds the manager.
For John PittalugaDirector of Marketing for the Southern Cone of Tetra Pack, in the current social context “it is very difficult to impact consumers”. “They are scattered across countless platforms and media. For this reason, we must use all possible tools to reach them with our messages”, he describes.
Companies are already giving concrete signs of the direction the market is taking between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). One case is the line “Coca-Cola Byte”, the company’s global marketing initiative, “the first sugar-free flavor born in the metaverse”, as announced in a statement. “Inspired by the limitless creativity of the global community of gamers, Coca-Cola Byte brings the flavor of pixels to life in a beverage that transcends both the digital and physical worlds,” he elaborated.
Landing. “These are new tools that allow us to communicate in a disruptive way,” says Pittaluga. Tetra Pak has “Pack Story” “as a channel to make AR experiences even more massive, providing our customers with this tool at very competitive costs. Our dream is for our clients’ brands to speak via AR, through our packaging”, Pittaluga projects.
“In a world where the digital is increasingly mixed with the physical, brands have to have their 3D version”, adds Santiago Corn, one of the founders of the agency Bitgeyser. On this aspect, his vision is that “this means experimenting with new messages and media to reach audiences that are no longer so impacted by traditional communication.”
Experts make a difference between AR and VR: “AR has an advantage over VR, because it is already available on millions of smartphones and there are still several years to go before VR headsets are in the home. people”. For this reason, companies are beginning to bet, but they still need to integrate these tools into communication campaigns to educate people about how they work and what they can find different using these media.
reasons. Why do companies get on this move? Pittaluga replies: “The trend is to make life easier for the consumer. We are no longer going to need an application, we are going to WebAR and then it will be augmented or virtual reality glasses. Everything moves very quickly. The consumer wants information at the moment, when he buys, he can scan and have infinite experiences and information in a dynamic and playful way”. In turn, for Maíz, “the main difference is that it transforms the content into an experience, and what this achieves is greater recall in the messages.” HThere are studies from Meta, Accenture and Mindshare on a global scale that are beginning to talk about the positive impact that the use of this technology has on the memorability of messages. “We at PackStory, Tetra Pak’s AR platform, see that when we combine immersive content with gaming the average time spent per person reaches three minutes. It is a huge difference compared to the fleeting attention that content has in other media. This metric needs to be exploited much more, but combining this with a greater audience reach, that is why we are betting heavily on WebAr (augmented reality on the web)”expands Corn.
“The world of the Metaverse generates a new type of Internet, the possibility of virtual influencers appearing, which already exist in other formats, traditional media, such as Instagram, YouTube, Tik-Tok, especially in Asia, where they are growing a lot. You don’t see it as much in the West, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. In this virtual dimension, figures emerge that function as influencers, relevant characters for what they say, what they do, how they dress, etc..”, highlights John MarencoCEO of BeInfluencers. And he closes: “Brands in Argentina are already testing it, but what we do not see in Metaverse are content creators. We only observe an incipient tendency to build influence in this territory. It could happen that Metaverse generates another kind of Internet in parallel, probably more niche, so that in the not too distant future we will have the first Argentine and Latin American influencers within that world“.
Precisely a new world is being born and companies sign up to discover it. The cost of being left out could be very high in a market whose dynamics sometimes accelerate to the beat of technological innovation and the permanent search for new experiences by a segment of the public at the forefront of consumption.
Marcelo Alfano
by Marcelo Alfano
