IAB publishes guide for brands to start marketing in the metaverse

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released its Metaverse for Brands Guide, designed to help marketers evaluate their options. The report includes key definitions, an overview of current metaverse-like experiences, and examples of successful metaverse marketing campaigns.

The IAB guide takes a hands-on approach and helps marketers ask key questions before diving into the metaverse. Specifically, the IAB focuses on helping brands choose the right type of metaverse experience for their target audience and helping brands think about long-term strategy questions.

The IAB has highlighted some of them universal takeaways which apply to all brands.

• Create unforgettable experiences: The metaverse exists in a virtual world, take advantage of that. Brand metaverse experiences must include elements in their activations that are not available in the physical world.
• Prioritize creators and authenticity: Creators are the ambassadors of a brand’s metaverse experience. They are an important driveway, so prioritize relevance and authenticity.
• Drive back to experience: To truly succeed, metaverse experiences shouldn’t be a flash in the pan. Experiences must persist and evolve over time to retain audiences and attract new ones.
• Amplifiers amplify: Empowering content creators is a must to extend the lifecycle and reach of a brand’s metaverse experience.

In addition, the IAB report provides numerous examples of successful campaigns by non-gaming brands. However, these case studies embody (perhaps unintentionally) the IAB’s concern about measuring the effectiveness of immersive experience ads. Aside from the company’s updated guidelines on in-game advertising, it has no real consensus on standardized metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of ads in immersive media.

In the absence of industry-wide agreement, most marketers have resorted to time-tested metrics like frequency and reach. These come with the bonus of being more directly comparable to more traditional ad formats. However, the IAB suggests that this is changing with the growing interest in attention-based metrics that more directly measure the impact of media placements. First-party data is often inaccessible to brands, making this transition more difficult. The IAB even went so far as to release a data wish list that would help marketers evaluate the effectiveness of metaverse ads.

The full IAB Metaverse for Brands Guide is available now and was written with support from industry leaders at Activision Blizzard, esports organization Dignitas, Meta, Trigger XR, Twitch, and Vindex.