Wunderman Thompson has partnered with Odyssey, to celebrate the start of this year’s Cannes Lion festival by launching a virtual beach named WT Inspiration Beach.
The advertising company was the first of its kind to develop its metaverse. The Wunderman Thompson launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022, the world’s largest tech conference.
The WT Inspiration Beach Experience
The beach is an immersive metaverse space that allows visitors worldwide to experience Wunderman Thompson’s unique creativity, content, and connectivity approach.
It‘s custom-built and comes with various features that include:
- A networking lounge
- Collaboration spaces
- A showcase of the agency’s best works
There will be additional features, including a DJ booth and an interactive shopping area to keep visitors engaged soon.
Inspirational Kiosks
The beach has “inspirational kiosks,” each representing Wunderman Thompson’s perspective on the key industry themes, which include:
- Data and Technology
- Brand creativity and effectiveness
- Sustainability
- Talent
- IE&D
- Business transformation
The kiosks provide visitors with contextual information about the experience.
WT Inspiration Beach will soon host a group of experts this year on the 12th of July to discuss the awards at the Cannes Lions 2022 festival. They will also discuss the works awarded and trends shaping the world’s leading creativity festival.
How Brands Will Benefit From WT Inspirational Beach
According to Reid Santabarbara, Odyssey’s CEO, the virtual beach offers ambitious brands accessibility to the highest-visual fidelity streaming metaverse platform.
Through the immersive experience on the beach, they will get a demonstration of the limitless opportunities they can explore on the metaverse, including:
- Digital possessions
- NFTs
- Travelportation
- New digital societies
As a thought leader in the metaverse, Wunderman Thompson has published two reports:
- The first is about the rise of this new frontier of customer experience, Into the Metaverse, launched in September 2021.
- The second one found that awareness of the metaverse has doubled in less than a year. New Realities: Into the Metaverse and Beyond was launched in May 2022.
This year, Metaverse has taken the spotlight at the Cannes festival. Other than Wunderman Thompson’s beach, other brand showcased their progress in the metaverse space.
- Meta rebranded its product Facebook Pay to Meta Pay. The social media giant has also expressed its ambition to become the digital wallet for the metaverse space. The plan is that, this wallet will not only conveniently pay in this space but also manage the owner’s identity and virtual possessions.
- The Meta Beach was also present, offering badged and non-badged members sessions, workshops, and activations in the metaverse space.
- The self-proclaimed “Queen of metaverse” Paris Hilton was also present. Paris launched her own NFT back in 2021 and is currently one of the highest female earners for the sale of an NFT.
Wunderman Thompson and the Inspiration Behind WT Inspiration Beach
Wunderman Thompson is a Newyork advertising company invested in creativity, consultancy, and technology to inspire growth in its clients. It’s part of the international advertising group WPP, formed as a merger between WPP and the world’s oldest advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.
The company has received nine Lions in this year’s Cannes Festival, including the inaugural Creative B2B Grand Prix.
According to Gareth Jones, the company’s SVP of Global Marketing, WT Inspire Beach, was inspired by the need to create a more inclusive customer experience. Wunderman Thompson offers its clients and colleagues a chance to experience it in a highly immersive environment through the WT Inspiration Beach.
Final Thoughts
Being a thought leader in the metaverse space, Wunderman Thompson is helping brands make sense of it all by offering them the WT Inspiration beach.
There seems to be an overlap between the metaverse and gaming. However, gaming is not metaverse but just a tiny part of it. There’s more for brands to explore beyond gaming.
Brands must look beyond gaming when thinking about the metaverse because a significant fraction of their potential customers is not in gaming. They should not ignore them.
The metaverse is about connection, including gaming, storytelling, and play. The more we can gamify connections, the stronger those connections will be, and that’s good for brands.
There’s still a lot of ground for brands to cover before they can fully understand this immersive world and exploit all available opportunities. That’s why Wunderman Thompson is making this a reality. And what better way to learn about the metaverse but in the metaverse itself?
