It’s 2026 and we can now talk about the metaverse campaigns with the clinical distance of a retrospective. The brand activations in virtual worlds. The NFT-gated experiences. The branded “spaces” in Decentraland and Roblox that cost six figures to build and averaged 200 visitors in the first week, 40 in the second, and 3 on any given Tuesday in perpetuity. The Chief Metaverse Officers hired in 2022 and quietly reclassified as “Head of Digital Experience” by 2024. The press releases celebrating “immersive brand worlds” that nobody visited. This is the post-mortem nobody wrote at the time because writing it at the time would have required admitting something.
What the Brief Said
The brief said: “We want to be present where our audience is going.” It was written in 2022, based on a revenue projection statistic from an analyst with a financial interest in the metaverse. It cited the Facebook rebrand to Meta as evidence that the technology was becoming mainstream — an interesting reading of an event that now looks more like a company rebranding to escape a PR crisis than a signal of cultural tectonic shift. The target audience was 18-34. Research showed that 18-34 year-olds were gaming, which was interpreted to mean they were a metaverse audience, which was interpreted to mean they wanted branded virtual experiences from cosmetics companies and financial services firms. The research was doing more work than research can do.
What the Build Looked Like
The virtual experience had a lobby, because virtual experiences needed lobbies. The lobby had a branded texture on the floor and a logo on the wall and ambient music that felt uncanny in spatial audio. There were three zones: an “exploration” zone (a room with clickable objects), an “experience” zone (a branded video played), and a “community” zone (nobody was ever in it). The UX required users to download a client, create an account, select an avatar, navigate a 3D environment with controls that assumed gaming familiarity, and then find the brand’s space inside a virtual world containing thousands of other empty spaces. The conversion from “person who read press release” to “person who entered the brand space” was approximately 1.2%. This was reported as a success because the absolute number was in the thousands and percentages were not included in the deck. The KPI Shark would have asked about dwell time. Nobody tracked dwell time.
Why It Failed (The Version That’s Actually True)
The metaverse campaign failed for a simple reason: it was a technology solution in search of a behavior that didn’t exist. People were not waiting for brands to create virtual spaces. They were gaming — in dedicated platforms with their own social dynamics, aesthetic conventions, and communities. Grafting a brand experience onto that context requires either deep integration with the native culture of the platform or an experience compelling enough to pull people out of their existing behavior patterns. Nobody did either of those things. They built lobbies. The underlying dynamic was familiar: a technology gets media coverage, the coverage generates executive FOMO, the FOMO generates a brief, the brief generates a campaign, the campaign generates a press release, and the press release generates the next round of coverage. The loop has nothing to do with user behavior. It has everything to do with how the industry manages executive anxiety about missing the next thing.
What We Learned (Or Should Have)
The post-metaverse lesson is not “don’t innovate.” It’s: before you build the space, demonstrate the demand. Before you build the experience, understand the behavior. The brands that did interesting things in gaming-adjacent spaces — not metaverse activations, but actual integrations with gaming culture, with communities that already existed — mostly did them quietly, without press releases, with creative teams who actually played games. They were not announced as metaverse strategies. But they generated actual engagement with actual people, which is the metric the KPI Shark has always cared about. The brief said the metaverse was where the audience was. The audience was somewhere else entirely. Get the merch for people who’ve been there: nobriefsclub.com/shop.
