Weekly Metaverse #131: Apple is quiet, Meta has dragons and lasers
Two very different approaches to marketing
Meta laid off a lot of people this week, which has naturally led to lots of articles about how Zuckerberg’s bet on the metaverse was misguided and so forth. As always, I’ll acknowledge that as a guy who writes a weekly column about the metaverse I’m pretty biased, but nonetheless, these takes are all nonsense.
That’s not to say that Zuckerberg’s metaverse investment might fail - that is, of course, possible. But the idea that layoffs are some sort of a signal really misses the big picture. When times are good and the money is rolling in, you hire and grow to make sure you grab your piece of the ever-growing pie. When times are bad, you tighten the old belt. These cycles are more or less universal (to varying degrees) among profit-seeking companies.
Anyway, I’ve got better Meta-related things to write about - namely, this commercial:
Obviously this commercial is awesome. Unfortunately it’s simultaneously terrible.
The awesome part is apparent… dragons and lasers and shit. I’m a nerd. I love dragons and lasers and shit.
The terrible part is that Meta just cannot get its message of what the hell the metaverse is straight. When the Quest Pro launched it was passthrough AR to enhance your meetings. Now it’s dragons and lasers and shit in what’s pretty clearly VR.
Look, I get it - the metaverse can (and probably will) comprise powerful enterprise tools and also sweet video games. But you’ve gotta get some kind of consistent messaging or people will just be confused and never try your products in the first place. I’d hate to be the exec that proposes trying some Quest Pros to his boss to see if they improve remote collaboration, only to find out that the person he’s proposing it to doesn’t know much about Meta but has seen this video. That conversation isn’t going to go well.
But even putting aside the mixed messaging for a moment, this ad doesn’t exactly match the reality of what you’re going to get with any kind of Quest headset. I honestly wonder how the pitch meeting for this went?
“We want an awesome commercial about the metaverse!”
“Okay, so what’s in the metaverse that you want to highlight?”
“Awesome stuff!”
“Okay… could you be more specific? Are there any particular games or experiences you want to show people?”
“DRAGONS”
“Okay great, so you have a game with dragons - could we get a copy of it to try out, so we can make sure to create a commercial that looks like the game?”
“DRAGONS AND LASERS”
“Okay, yeah, fine. Dragons and lasers. You’ve got it.”
Do you think the people who storyboarded that were among the ones that got laid off? I truly wonder.
This is all to say that it’s somehow both baffling and totally unsurprising to me that Meta’s marketing is such a shitshow. On the one hand, they’ve always been truly abysmal at messaging stuff to the public (see any of the 1000 scandals they’ve been involved in, and also watch Zuckerberg giving any speech ever).
On the other hand, when you change your company name to Meta in order to help sell a vision of the future as you see it, you’d think that you’d hire some people who are really, really good at painting visions of the future for people. You’ve gotta hire thousands of hardware and software engineers to build the product, but it only takes a handful of great marketers to build a coherent strategy about how you’re going to talk about it during the many years it takes before you’ve built the damn thing. I know marketing is a somewhat maligned profession in Silicon Valley, but this really feels like the place where you need it.
Or just go with dragons and lasers. I’m not your boss, Zuck.
How About Apple?
Apple, in contrast to Meta, is still quiet about what they’re planning to put into the world when it comes to AR and VR. In a vacuum, I don’t think this is necessarily a great strategy - it feels like they’re very much giving up an opportunity to define the space through messaging - but in practice it’s looking pretty good compared to what Meta’s doing.
Luckily, we do have enough leaks to have a pretty good idea about the upcoming hardware - here’s a good Tweet thread that summarizes the state of things:
The hardware’s clearly going to be good, but what remains to be seen is the user experience. There are a few hints in there, like clips that go on your fingers for hand tracking, plus room mapping features that really feel like they’ll lend themselves to some high-quality AR experiences.
The actual applications of these are a much bigger question mark for me - Facebook’s steadily building up a library of apps and content, and developers have had plenty of time to really learn how to build for Oculus hardware. Apple doesn’t seem to have let dev kits make their way out into the world, so one might wonder whether they’ll launch with the sort of compelling apps that will justify what will inevitably be a high price point, or if the initial release will be powerful piece of hardware with nothing that makes people really want to pick it up.
I do think that Apple will deliver a product that offers some magical experiences, since that’s what they do well. I imagine some AR that seamlessly blends in with your surroundings - the question for me is whether it’ll just be AR demos that people try at the Apple store, or whether there will be enough there to get them to take a headset home.
Ultimately, the risk of taking Apple’s approach of foregoing marketing is that they’re giving up the chance to set expectations. Now let’s be clear - in terms of quality, I fully expect Apple to deliver a product that lives up to people’s expectations. But how it’ll be used and what kinds of experiences people will have with it? That’s a mystery, and even if it’s a great product, folks may be disappointed if it doesn’t do what they expect.
Maybe that’s Meta’s real game here… define the metaverse as a place with dragons! and lasers! So when Apple doesn’t have those, people are disappointed.
Metaverse News
Here’s a neat video. AR games that incorporate your surrounds are going to be awesome. At least until the next pandemic comes and you’re stuck with your studio apartment as the only level.
Real Planes, Virtual Adversaries In Red 6 AR: (Forbes): A really compelling use of AR.
How Will We Pay for Things in the Metaverse? (Forbes): Honestly, my guess is it’ll just end up being a credit card linked to your Meta account or what have you, but there’s definitely an opportunity to do something new with payments here.
China’s State Council warns against metaverse fever (CoinGeek): If only they’d been so proactive about warning about that other fever that one time.
Meet the Metaverse Nightclub–Loving Audit Firm That Presided Over FTX’s Financials (CoinDesk): Look, I made it this far without referencing FTX! That’s pretty good if you ask me.
Metaverse ‘yada yada yada’ — Anything World raises $7.5m for its AI animation tool (Sifted): AI-powered software for 3D animation.