Marketing agency Luckie & Company opened up its first office in the metaverse. The virtual office is in Decentraland and will be used to hold client meetings, internal meetups, job fairs and events, as well as a place to show off Web3 work done for its clients.
The virtual space includes a gallery of NFTs the agency has created for its clients including Regions Bank, Alabama Power, and the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. Other floors will be used for presentations and gatherings.
The agency also opened a 15,000-square-foot office in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, and just finished a six-month renovation and expansion of the agency’s Atlanta office, doubling in size.
—Keira Wingate
New York-based creative agency Barbarian has launched Barbarian Innovation Labs to help clients better reach consumers across Web3, in the metaverse, AR/VR and other tech spaces. The agency also launched Barbarian Data, where clients can collect and activate first-party customer data.
The innovation lab is led by Chief Strategy Officer Eliza Yvette Esquivel. Barbarian's data service is led by Chief Technology Officer Lawrence Edmondson.
—Keira Wingate
A slate of notable companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Epic Games and Sony, among others, have formed a group to help create guidelines for building an open metaverse.
Dubbed “The Metaverse Standards Forum,” the group will seek to understand what progress is needed to enhance interoperability—the capacity to move freely between spaces—in the metaverse, as well as accelerate the impact that a standards group can have on the developing space. The Forum will focus on “action-based projects,” such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, open-source tooling and more. Any organization can join the group at no cost.
—Asa Hiken
Time Magazine is teaming with The Sandbox to construct a virtual hub for art and commerce. The publication’s NFT initiative, TimePieces, will build a destination inspired by the iconic New York City neighborhood on a plot of virtual land. Time president Keith Grossman said the experience will provide unique experiences for holders of its NFTs, such as discussions, events and screenings of Time Studio projects, according to The Defiant.
—Asa Hiken
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity may be in person this year for the first time since 2019, but that hasn’t stopped brands and agencies from thinking virtual. Not only are some marketers making Cannes sessions available in virtual real estate platforms, but parties and activities outside of the normal programming are also being offered in the metaverse.
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McCann Worldgroup
While the rest of ad land settles into life on the French Riviera at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, McCann Worldgroup is bringing the event to another realm: the metaverse.
The agency unveiled today “MWverse,” a virtual gallery that will house McCann’s most memorable ad campaigns of the year.
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Meta Horizon Worlds Cannes
Meta’s Nicola Mendelsohn has been meeting with media, brands and agencies to explain Meta’s metaverse ambitions, which are still a puzzle to many advertisers.
At Cannes, Meta is also discussing augmented reality, a more subtle digital layer that people could access through cameras on phones and through new computing glasses, such as the ones Meta designed with Ray-Ban and revealed last year.
—Garett Sloane
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Lowes
At Cannes, Lowes unveiled its NFT and metaverse strategy, and it involves turning real-world builders into virtual ones.
—Garett Sloane
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Nasdaq Exchange via Twitter
Nasdaq’s opening bell rang today in the metaverse for the first time. The ceremony, which happens every weekday morning to signal the opening of the stock market, was a collaboration with design consultancy Journey, which also announced the launch of its metaverse studio. Journey and Core, the metaverse platform in which the bell-ringing took place, joined Nasdaq in person at its Times Square studio to accompany the virtual bell with the ringing of the real one.
In a live stream posted by Nasdaq’s Twitter account, the opening bell in the metaverse showed a group of avatars clapping in a virtual Nasdaq studio, which mirrored the scene in Times Square.
The first Opening Bell in the #Metaverse has arrived at the @NasdaqExchange. ��️ Alongside @journeydotworld and @CoreGames watch as we host the Opening Bell LIVE from the physical world and transition into the Metaverse. ✨ https://t.co/JO8TzmPsBH
— Nasdaq Exchange (@NasdaqExchange) June 17, 2022
“I think [this] is a sign of understanding that virtual and physical are going to continue to come closer together,” said Cathy Hackl, co-founder and chief metaverse officer at Journey. Hackl also gave a speech during this morning’s ceremony in Times Square.
—Asa Hiken
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NYX Cosmetics
NYX Professional Makeup, owned by L’Oréal, is launching a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to foster the growth of beauty-focused virtual avatars. A DAO is a blockchain-based group that works together to deploy money in a specific way. For NYX’s DAO, called “Gorjs,” members will aim to increase the aptitude of digital makeup and support the success of each other’s careers. Each member will be a creator behind a beauty-focused virtual avatar. The timing of the launch is to be announced, but a wait list is open for prospective members to join.
Until then, NYX has partnered with three well-known virtual avatars to get the ball rolling: Smeccea, Craves and Curry Tian. They will drop NFT collections in the DAO once the ecosystem is developed and more creators are added. This is the latest Web3-focused effort from NYX; last month, the brand joined a DEI experience on virtual platform The Sandbox to help launch an NFT collection of diverse avatar traits.
—Asa Hiken
Read more: NYX joins DEI metaverse experience on The Sandbox
