Dive Brief:

• Mediahub Worldwide and metaverse development studio LandVault have partnered to provide Web3 strategy and consulting services for the media agency’s clients, according to a press release shared with Marketing Dive. 
• The companies co-developed a Web3 RFP Brief to help assess clients’ comfort level and knowledge of metaverse activations and identify the internal stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. 
• Mediahub, which is part of Interpublic Group, launched the new practice Rabbit Hole Ocean to oversee the partnership and offer specialized strategic planning, co-development of shared virtual experiences and opportunities for media distribution.

Dive Insight:

The LandVault partnership, along with the Web3 RFP that will be implemented globally throughout Mediahub, is meant to help the global media agency and its clients, which include Netflix, Twitch, NBA and Western Union, begin incorporating next-generation strategies and activations into their current planning.

As the next phase of the internet, Web3 currently promises much but does not yet hold a lot of certainty. Accordingly, the new technologies underpinning it, including NFT programs, decentralized finance, tokenomics and the relatively untapped potential of shared virtual experiences, require a new creative approach for clients. 

The Web3 RFP was developed to provide a framework to ensure individual activations ladder up to a unified strategy. The Web3 RFP has been designed to dig into the key factors that drive success, including platform relevance, social commerce and commercial needs, digital currency fluency and measurement. 

“Clients are increasingly looking to new media canvases like the metaverse and Web3 applications to challenge the conventions of their category and reach their audiences in new ways,” said Laurel Boyd, Mediahub’s chief creative media officer, in a statement. 

Though much is still not known about how Web3 and the metaverse will play out, and where brands will fit in, agencies are working hard to stay ahead of the curve. Earlier this year, WPP launched a partnership with Epic Games to help skill agency creatives in the development of custom brand experiences in Fortnite and how to use Epic’s Unreal Engine for real-time 3D creation and virtual production. More recently, Dentsu Creative launched Dentsu VI, which is designed to provide brands with a virtual face and personality to use across digital platforms.

“This moment for the Metaverse is analogous to the pre-iPhone mobile era. There is a lot of excitement, but we haven’t had the true cultural catalyst,” noted Rosh Singh, managing director for EMEA at UNIT9, which recently built a Metaverse Advisory Department (MAD), in comments to Marketing Dive earlier this year. “What is really interesting from the mobile era is the spawn of new business models as seen by Uber and Airbnb — truly understanding what your business model looks like in the metaverse era is much more important at this stage than a simple activation partnership with a gaming platform.”