The metaverse: the new battleground for brands

There’s a line I keep coming back to, from the architect Cedric Price in the 1960s: “Technology is the answer — but what was the question?” Before any brand rushes into the metaverse, that’s the question to sit with. Do we need it to live faster? To sell more products? After a decade building augmented and virtual reality — which we now call the metaverse — I’ve learned that the teams who start from why build things people actually use. The ones who start from “we need a metaverse” build expensive ghost towns.

What the metaverse actually is

Step back and look at the pattern of media: books, recording, cinema, radio, TV, the internet, mobile, social media — and now, what? Each wave asked the same question: where does the information go? Does it have to live on a flat 2D screen, or can I attach it to the world — can I be inside it? Call the answer spatial computing, AR/VR, or the metaverse; the real shift is simply the new position of information.

It’s still the Wild West — everyone points at their thing and calls it a metaverse. So here’s a working formula: a virtual space + virtual content + a simple avatar + communicating with others + the ability to purchase or engage. Put those together and you’ve got something you can reasonably call a metaverse.

Two rules that matter most

1. No one owns it. The metaverse is like the internet — Meta doesn’t own it any more than one company owns the web. You’re a participant, not a tenant. It’s for everyone: any size, any avatar, even any level of quality.

2. It has to be open. Think of a JPEG — you can open it, print it, send it anywhere, and it just works. The metaverse is still searching for that universal standard. The practical version of “open” is interoperability: an item created once should be usable in a virtual world, viewable in augmented reality, and connectable to a smart contract — the same file, everywhere, no app or gatekeeper required. Get that right and you’ve found something close to the standard.

The metaverse isn’t about wearing glasses. It’s about wanting to engage with people and information in a different way.

Why brands are pouring in

Because the audience is already there, and it spends. A few cases I point to (figures are roughly as reported): a sneaker drop selling 600 pairs in about seven minutes; a Gucci bag reselling inside Roblox for around $4,000 across thousands of purchases; Balenciaga, Burberry, Ferrari all launching branded worlds. The headline example is the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite — somewhere north of 12 million visitors and roughly $17 million in items sold.

And crucially, most of this happens without a crypto wallet. The number of actual NFT owners is small; the number of people happily walking into a social virtual world is enormous. Don’t confuse the wallet count with the audience.

The honest reality-check

Now the part most metaverse talks skip. That Travis Scott concert? A friend who worked on it told me there were never more than ~100 people in a single instance — it was many copies of the same space, released to users in waves over about a week. So drop the fantasy of 10,000 people in one room. If you need the feeling of a crowd, you generate it. If you want to “speak to a million people” in one event, you’ll really be speaking to one or two at a time — and that’s fine.

Be honest about quality, too. A lot of the metaverse is still glitchy: you walk in, you’re not sure how to talk to anyone, the frame rate crawls even on a powerful PC, and half the time no one’s there. I once spent half an hour in a “social” world and met no one. But also notice the flip side: graphics quality matters far less than people assume. Roblox and Minecraft look blocky and have hundreds of millions of users. For most people, “good enough to inhabit” beats “photoreal.”

What actually works for a brand

• Keep it yours — white-label. Brands rarely want to send their audience off to someone else’s metaverse. A white-label, open world lets you keep users on your own infrastructure, with portals, multiplayer, and an optional wallet — but it feels like your brand, not a platform’s.
• Insist on interoperability. One object that works as a web AR file, a world item, and a smart-contract asset — no app required — is worth more than a flashy one-off. It’s the difference between an experiment and an investment.
• Bridge to the physical, don’t escape it. The brief I hear most: “I have a physical product — bring it to the digital world, and if someone buys the NFT, ship them the physical one too.” People don’t want to flee reality; they want a connection to it.
• Match the aesthetic to the brand. Not everyone wants Fortnite gloss. Some brands specifically want low-poly, hand-drawn, “kid’s drawing” worlds. Your platform should deliver many visual languages, not one.
• Collaboration beats ownership. In the metaverse it pays to have others on board — an interplay between brands, artists, even architects (we’ve worked with names like MVRDV and Zaha Hadid Architects) — far more than planting a flag and saying “mine.”

And the ethics, early

Different people want very different experiences. Some won’t share their data; some won’t enter a world that doesn’t account for its CO₂. Those aren’t edge cases — they’re design requirements. The same care applies to attention and behaviour inside these worlds, which I dig into in the ethics of spatial computing. Build the limits and the consent in from day one, not after the backlash.

We’ve put these ideas to work across projects — from a virtual exhibition for the Hermitage (more in immersive museums) to operating the metaverse for Dubai Culture with local artists. The throughline is always the same: open, interoperable, connected to the real world, and built with people rather than at them. That’s the battleground — and collaboration, not ownership, is how you win it.

For the broader shift underneath all this, see what changes when the interface is the world.