Ball adds that the speed at which brands wanted to act, without a real plan or understanding of the space, created issues for its longevity: “There was definitely a lot of, ‘We need to do this because everyone’s doing it,’ and ‘We need to do this because shareholders expect us to be doing it.’ There were many that overestimated the relevance of their brand in these 3D spaces.”
A Pivot to AI
Now, many of the chief metaverse officers, who had been so quickly installed, scrambled to reinvent themselves—or otherwise found themselves out of a job entirely. Coca-Cola’s Pratik Thakar swiftly pivoted from spearheading the brand’s metaverse content to becoming the company’s global generative AI lead in August 2023.
Around the same time, Michael White, who was tasked to lead Disney’s metaverse efforts in 2022, left after the brand’s dedicated metaverse division was closed down; the company announced it was launching a new AI “task force” just days later. Then, in the wake of Triefus’ departure from Gucci, the brand promoted a collaboration with Christie’s on its first generative AI project.
In case any further proof was needed that the shift from the metaverse to AI was complete, in the last quarter of 2022, Bloomberg transcript data recorded just two mentions of the metaverse in earnings calls at S&P 500 businesses. In the first quarter of 2023, AI had racked up 1,073.
According to Cathy Hackl, formerly the chief metaverse officer for a consulting firm called Journey, the broad-scale marketing shift from virtual brand experiences to AI was both a savvy business decision and just another example of technological bandwagon-jumping.
Today, Hackl reflects on the metaverse land grab as a phenomenon that quickly escalated out of control. “There was this rush among PR teams to get anything ‘metaverse’ out there,” she says. “I think we’ll look back at it as a really interesting moment in time, but maybe we all got ahead of our skis a little bit.”
Don’t Mention the “M” Word
Even Hackl, who was given the nickname “Godmother of the Metaverse,” has been distancing herself from the concept, founding “a spatial computing and AI solutions company” earlier this year, with any mention of metaverse notable in its absence.
The metaverse-focused initiatives that once seemed to be a part of every launch are also suspiciously quiet. Bulgari, which launched an NFT jewelry collection on Polygon’s blockchain in 2022, confirmed to WIRED that it has no plans for any further collections in the future.
UNXD, a “curated NFT marketplace,” with partners including Dolce & Gabbana, Jacob & Co., and Valentino, is still advertising a competition for Metaverse Fashion Week 2023, along with a number of “to be announced” collections that had been confirmed for launch in 2022.
The buzz on collections that were initially successful has all but died too—Tiffany NFTiffs now sell for around $2,300 on NFT marketplace OpenSea, a drop of more than 95 percent from peak selling prices, while the activity on Gucci’s “Superplastic” NFT series on OpenSea shows a staggering drop in sales interest from around September 2022, and now—virtually nothing.