Happy Monday. Did you know? In the UK there is a limit of 12-minutes of advertisements per one hour – representing one of the strictest sets of legislation in Europe. Conversely, Nielsen estimates that approximately one quarter of all programming on American television is advertising.
In today’s edit:
Yats, yats, yat? → new digital identity?
Latest TikTok Trends
Tiny Guide → How brands can enter the metaverse
Tool of the week
Content predictions for 2022
Disney is building residential housing communities so true Disney fans never have to leave.
First look at the Metaverse Experience virtual island.
‘Making music is about making assets for social media’: pop stars battle digital burnout.
‘Prospect’ Filmmakers Turn to NFTs to Finance New Shared Universe. Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell are creating a sci-fi property, 'The Fringe,' which they hope will not be creatively beholden to financiers or distributors.
LinkedIn debuts its own podcast network. LinkedIn is delving deeper into the podcast world. It’s debuting a podcast network that features in-house shows from the LinkedIn News team as well as programs from industry figures.
Clubhouse adds text-based chat rooms for the mic shy. Clubhouse announced in-room chat Thursday, adding a text chat feature into its voice rooms that’s akin to what people might see on YouTube or Twitch
Spotify debuts its first 'bookcast' from Dolly Parton and James Patterson. The format combines audio storytelling with original music and sound elements.
Future of TV Briefing: The subscription-based streaming war is demanding bigger war chests.
Together with DTCX3
FREE Event - DTCX3 is Back!
DTCX3 on 2-3 March 2022 features 50+ leaders across the industry, including the TOP experts from Glamnetic, NYDJ, Jones Road, Gorgias, Shopify, Klaviyo, Hush Blankets and many others, along with Marcus Lemonis as a keynote speaker. Join us for the largest virtual ecommerce event!
Yats could be the new digital identity
Is it time to forget about usernames, website names, and any other English words.
Time for you to start considering investing in your own emojis?
It may seem strange at first, but keep an open mind.
A Yat is just a string of emoji that, for the right price, can be yours. Yats work as URLs, linking to things like a user’s social platform or website.
Best way to imagine how it would work is… let’s say being known as 🎬💸🤓 or🕺🏽💯🙌🏼 instead of creativegeek91 or sara222@wishuemail.xyz. By owning a Yat - let’s say - it’s your forever. You are the only~ one on earth who owns these emojis.
Yats are an attempt to combine all of your online handles — whether for communication, payments, or anything else — into a single carefully chosen emoji combination. Yats are a censorship-resistant kind of pseudonymous identification for the internet era, with the intention of placing them onto the blockchain (more on that later).
If a Yat can combine all those handles, it actually sounds like a great way to handle your creative business.
Just like NFTs, Yats run for a wide variety of prices → anywhere from £3 to hundreds of thousands of pounds. And it already sold over 160k+ Yats (total of $20 million in about a year).
The highest paid for one so far is $425,000 for a single emoji of a key.
TikTok Trends
“16 missed calls” - Sound
“I’d like to leave” - Sound
“I Do Not Have Time for This” - Sound
“x Year Old Me” - Trend
How brands can enter the metaverse?
What should brands do when they first enter the metaverse? What is the metaverse, for that matter?
It can be sometimes very confusing.
While the concept may appear to be fresh at the moment, it has enormous potential for businesses if they can figure out where to begin. New technology necessitates a curious approach at all times, but brands should adhere to a few guidelines: Choose your goals, keep an eye on the competition, search for new apps, organise your entrance, and maintain your balance.
The basic idea of the metaverse is straightforward. Simply put, the metaverse includes any digital experience on the internet that is persistent, immersive, three-dimensional (3D), and virtual, as in, not happening in the physical world.
We can use metaverse experiences everyday to play, work, connect, or buy goods (reminds me of a particular Black Mirror episode).
Metaverse isn’t a single or connected reality. Different companies are producing separate virtual environments, with different memberships, monetisations and creative approaches. So think about Google, Microsoft and Meta building separate virtual environments.
Microsoft is positioning its cloud services to be the fabric of the metaverse, using its Mesh platform to enable avatars and immersive spaces to thread into the collaboration environments, such as Teams, over time.
For companies still waiting on the sidelines, it is important for each brand to find its place and balance the risk-reward equation.
Doing so requires grasping what is possible, and the companies that are leaning in fast can both offer inspiration and act as test cases. For example, there are plenty of brands taking full advantage of the gaming part of the metaverse with branded experiences that are essentially virtual and immersive sponsorships.
Here’s what brands can do right now:
Think about how much your target audiences/customers are spending time in the metaverse and calibrate your speed of attack appropriately.
See whether the metaverse gives you opportunities as a company to not only try new things, but also to accelerate your purpose or long-term goals like sustainability, which is well suited to many applications of the metaverse.
Ask your agency team to begin formulating a point of view on how your brand should show up in the metaverse and when it might make sense.
Most importantly, people in brand marketing or leadership roles should start thinking about how to unleash their creativity and their storytelling.
Tool
Nudge
You know what clients love? Good data. Nudge provides creators with a measurement toolkit, to show clients how well their content did. Track content, get insights, share the data.
#Classifieds
Tool
Oribi
Hlps you analyze your website and get actionable insights that will maximize your conversions. You can track every single button click and page view, automatically, without using code!
Content Predictions for 2022
Content marketing has never evolved more quickly than in the past two years. Let’s explore some of the predictions 👇
Adopt people-centric brand storytelling → your content needs to come from a place of honesty, communicate with clarity, and relate to their emotional needs and interests – not just their transactional ones.
Focus on video → the most powerful content format. Considering 80% of all internet traffic is now video, it’s safe to say that the average person consumes more video than any other type of content. “Short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts are, arguably, the biggest opportunity brands have today to gain organic visibility.”
Reimagine search and the data landscape in a cookie-less world → In a cookie-less world, marketers will need to prepare for personalization. Google, Facebook, and other entities are trying to capture your traffic and keep it within their properties, which is hurting brands’ organic conversions.
Stay tuned for moore predictions in the next newsletter.
Extras ⚡️
To watch → First Date Feelings in London (short film)
To read → Everything you need to know about.. Your business plan
Learn about yourself → How good are you at communication in love? questionnaire
Help us shape The Commercial Creative newsletter…
With your feedback, we can improve the newsletter. Click on a link to vote & add your feedback or submit what you would like us to cover👇