Meta campaign in Europe: Metaverse could contribute billions to European GDP

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• Meta starts advertising campaign for Metaversum
• Tangible benefits for real life
• Great potential for the digital economy in Europe

In the fall of 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed his Facebook group Meta. One can rightly speculate that with this change of name he also wanted to polish up the scratched image of the world’s largest Internet network, but the official justification cannot be dismissed out of hand: the new name should reflect a new company vision, namely to build the so-called “Metaverse”, a three-dimensional interactive and immersive environment that people can access via different devices.

Big European campaign

Mark Zuckerberg firmly believes in a glorious future for the Metaverse and the people of Europe should now be convinced of that. To this end, the new campaign “The Impact Will Be Real” was launched in Europe on September 5, which is to run in the long term. Among other things, several spots were developed for this purpose, some 15, some 30 seconds long.

A key advantage is that we humans can educate ourselves in 3D in the metaverse – “Architecture, history or even basic geometry are brought to life in a way that whiteboards and flat screens cannot do,” says a blog post, for example by Meta. In addition, reference is also made to numerous opportunities for the training of healthcare professionals, such as “practicing surgical procedures through to first aid training in a virtual, safe environment”.

A white paper prepared by the Analysis Group on behalf of Meta shows how great the economic potential of the Metaverse could be in Europe. According to this, after a decade, the metaverse could contribute $440 billion to regional GDP. However, it was assumed that the Metaverse would develop in a similar way to mobile technology in Europe and whether this will actually be the case is currently not foreseeable.

What is the Metaverse actually?

The word metaverse is composed of the Greek prefix “meta” meaning “after” or “beyond” and “verse” meaning “universe”. It first appeared in 1991 in Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’, a novel in which the population enters a virtual world and meets there in the form of avatars, ie images of themselves.

However, the actual final functionality of this new technology is not yet certain, after all, the development of the Metaverse is still in an early phase. But according to the Meta Group, it is essentially “a new kind of presence and proximity in virtual space.” According to the meta blog post, the metaverse will transform the way people connect with each other while providing even better social experiences than anything currently on the internet.

Cooperation is required

However, Meta itself admits that much of what the company envisions for the Metaverse is still about ten years away. This requires cross-industry cooperation between experts, scientists, civil society, governments and regulatory authorities in order to take the right steps together.

A joint approach seems all the more important as more and more companies have been presenting their own plans for the Metaverse since Mark Zuckerberg focused on the Metaverse. They all want to define the new trend and are running away in different directions, often from the perspective of their own services and products. The new Meta campaign should therefore also help to start an exchange at an early stage.

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Image sources: Valeriya Zankovych / Shutterstock.com, Meta