Ramsey Naja
LIFE IS A META-BEACH
There is a lot for us to learn from the 2008 financial crisis. Here we were, thinking life was the beach we had practically bought when, bang, reality struck and the beach turned out to be nothing more than a sewer’s embankment.
It was a crisis whose fallouts were just as unprecedented as they were long-lasting. But of all of them, perhaps the most bizarre was a sudden renewed interest in, well, vinyl records. Another was a pick-up in Polaroid sales – shortly after the company had gone bankrupt.
As the expanding, blurred space between virtual and real collapsed, people didn’t just turn to hard cash and precious metals. They also found comfort in the tangible.
Now you may well attribute this to nostalgia and the fact that people, normally suckers for anything new and evanescent, also have a penchant for collecting stuff. But I like to think that there is a deeper reason for it.
The 2000s was the most unbelievable time in human history. Not because it was extraordinary, but because most of what defined that decade was rather taxing on any notion of belief: you had stock markets that were going through the stratosphere unchecked, gargantuan loans that made a mockery of collaterals and real estate values that were as reliable as the Tinder Swindler’s promises of fidelity. In other words, we were living in an ephemeral world.
Which brings me swiftly to our latest fixation: the metaverse. More than the extension of the internet, more than the new frontier for humanity, and certainly more than Mark Zuckerberg’s escape hatch, the metaverse is arguably the greatest real estate project of all time.
Forget the connectivity it offers and the endless possibilities that its disconnection from the laws of physics allow; it is simply our world, multiplied, but on LSD. It is all your fantasies’ repertoire, materialised, and happily cohabiting with that of Kim Jong-un.
More to the point, it is the thing commercial dreams are made of. Just when you thought you couldn’t squeeze anything more into your storage space, hey presto! You’ve got an endless depot that can fit everything your heart desires or imagines.
This would mean that the metaverse is the future of (insert industry name here, including our own).
But the problem is that, just like the whole aforementioned decade, the metaverse’s essential attribute is fakery. Just like the 2007 real estate bubble, it is only as real as its speculative value. And although it may well also create legions of new zillionaires, for my part I’d rather learn history’s lesson and put my money into the real thing. In other words, although I’ll happily stream music from some distant server, I’d rather do it while lying on a real sandy beach.
As brands discover the benefits of dynamically changing campaigns, the demand for countless alterations outstrips not just what can be provided by external agencies, but indeed what can realistically be achieved by humans as well.
Hung out on a limb, agencies are attempting to manoeuvre themselves closer to the trunk of a brand despite the pressure to deliver last-minute.
The post-Covid situation has crippled the agencies even further as the brands are pressing agencies to alter their costs to intertwine both sides’ success or failure.
Developing a campaign for maximum ROI and optimising it for effective performance is not an instant process.
Or, to put it another way, last-minute campaigns can prove to be an unnecessary waste of budget.
It’s high time for brands to start incorporating creative capabilities into their typically technical organisations, which will help them realise that an agency needs time to become creative and deliver according to the expected standards.