Latest Posts

City Municipalities Embrace the Metaverse: Pioneering a New Era of Customer Experience and Service

Virtual reality (VR) is creating entirely new ways to engage with our environment. It’s estimated that a VR device is in 75 million homes (that’s almost one device for every 4 people). And for those millions of folks, this immersive technology is reinventing how we approach our daily tasks, our work routines and our leisure activities in some pretty amazing ways.

But even more incredible than the small changes in daily life are the ramifications for smart cities. It’s no longer just about turning your home office into your ideal multi-screen VR workstation or turning your game room into the cockpit of galactic rebellion starship beyond galaxy’s edge. Now VR (with a little help from AR — augmented reality) is helping reshape, plan and optimize our world on the scale of neighborhoods and entire cities.

The Metaverse and Smart Cities

The captivating fusion of virtual reality, augmented reality, and social networking, known as the Metaverse, has caught the attention of city governments worldwide. This vibrant digital realm offers an innovative approach to engage citizens, enhance services, and add value to city life.

Though that complete fusion of these domains doesn’t exist yet, a variety of meta-worlds and other precursors are paving the way there. And these signals have clearly caught the attention of a few forward-thinking city governments around the world with the promise of engaging citizens, enhancing services and adding a new dimension to city life. Let’s take a tour of some of these emerging Metaverse municipalities.

Miami Gardens, Florida

Miami Gardens eagerly embraces the Metaverse, inviting residents and visitors to embark on a virtual exploration of its community. Users can discover the city’s intriguing landmarks, events, and culture in this immersive digital world — a fresh way to encourage civic involvement and celebrate the city’s unique allure. Each point of interest includes a kiosk with audio overview information for users. And this Metaverse strategy is a smart, accessible way to attract new residents, new businesses and new investment to fuel that future growth. Built on Ceek VR, the experience runs on iOS and Android devices.

Orlando, Florida

Orlando, in central Florida, is taking a different approach to unlocking the rewards of the Metaverse by positioning itself as a MetaCenter. MetaCenter is possible because Orlando is taking advantage of some of its inherent strengths as a hub for next-gen gaming, entertainment, AI, AR/VR, IoT, modeling, and simulation training to propel further investment in these industries. Using the Engage platform, Mayor Dyer did a VR simulcast of his “State of Downtown” in December, 2022 to solidify Orlando’s position as the center of the Metaverse, the “MetaCenter”.

Seoul, South Korea

Seoul is taking a more pragmatic approach to the Metaverse. Here, avatars can access essential services, such as tax advice or public document requests. Seoul’s ambitious 5-year digital master plan covers economic, cultural, tourism, educational, and civic areas. Citizens can vote on services they desire in their “Metacity,” granting them direct influence on the virtual world’s evolution.

A city official commented, “City services delivered in this manner may not attract everyone. But we hope that young people—a typically elusive demographic—will find this approach an enticing entry point to services like career counseling.”

Seoul proactively creates a respectful and inclusive virtual environment, devising user guidelines to govern behavior. Moreover, the city implements digital equity programs to ensure participation from all groups, regardless of age, income, or technological expertise. Metaverse Seoul is available on iOS and Android.

Boston, Massachusetts

In Boston, virtual reality is making inroads in the city planning department. Whereas previous models had limitations in simulating natural phenomena, such as sun exposure or air currents, the digital twin of Boston allows urban designers to more precisely see the repercussions of proposed developments to make smarter growth decisions.

Barbados

Venturing southward, the Government of Barbados has sanctioned the world’s inaugural Metaverse Embassy. This avant-garde diplomatic endeavor transcends the confines of the physical world, providing a valuable service for their citizens abroad no matter where they are located.

“The embassy is a small thing. The big thing is what governments can do together when land is no longer physical land and limitations are no longer part of the equation.” said Gabriel Abed, Barbados’ ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

The meta embassy is in development in Decentraland, and at the same time Barbados will continue to host traditional embassies while also exploring the potential of virtual-reality diplomacy.

Helsinki, Finland

The Finnish capital of Helsinki claims the crown as the world’s first city in the Metaverse. Started in 2015 and launched in 2018, it really took off during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, with an estimated 18% of the entire population visiting their digital capital, fueled by a concert in virtual reality.

The meta city allows people to tour, learn, socialize and connect with each other, including locals and tourists, and is now being used for city planning too. Virtual Helsinki is available on Vive, Rift and as a 360 video experience on YouTube.

Wellington, New Zealand

Over in the southern hemisphere, the Wellington City Council has created a digital twin of their picturesque city. This virtual replica, created by pulling together several data sources, including GIS maps and city-wide sensors, replicates the real world’s appearance and behavior. As a result, the technology facilitates more effective climate change adaptation planning, incorporating Māori knowledge, city planning data, and community values.

Austin, Texas

The vibrant city of Austin, Texas, witnessed the transformation of the popular annual festival, SXSW, into a virtual reality (VR) experience in response to the pandemic’s disruption. Utilizing the social platform VRChat, organizers constructed SXSW Online XR, a digital incarnation of the festival’s iconic sites and venues. As a testament to the versatility of VR, this virtual realm encompassed interactive elements like go carts and personal helicopters, environments for conference speakers and sessions, and individuals interacting at art galleries and socializing at virtual receptions, fostering a unique and immersive celebration of art, film, and technology.

Future Possibilities for Cities in the Metaverse

As the Metaverse continues to captivate the imagination of city leaders worldwide, it presents both opportunities and challenges. Cities must ensure that this new digital realm promotes inclusivity, fairness and safety while fostering innovation and growth.

New applications for transit planning, catering to residents with accessibilities concerns and utilizing AR and VR for virtual travel (and travel planning) are all possibilities still waiting to be explored. Just imagine how exploration in VR could inspire visitors before they arrive, giving them a sense of security that comes from familiarity, or even providing concierge services to help them plan their vacations. Including in-destination AR wayfinding would be a great way to help visitors navigate an unfamiliar place, while highlighting attractions that are easy to miss or off the beaten path for most tourists.

Establishing Best Practices for AR and VR Implementation

With the rapid adoption of AR and VR technologies, it becomes increasingly crucial for cities and organizations to consider master plans and best practices for their development. This includes everything from creating user guidelines, regulating conduct, safeguarding digital equity and seamlessly weaving AR and VR into pre-existing services and infrastructural frameworks.

Conclusion

The march of virtual reality into the realms of urban planning, government services and cultural events underscores its influence on the future of cities and human interaction.

Now’s the time for bold thinking from city leaders. It’s an opportunity for wholehearted adoption of AR and VR in spheres such as social services, planning and tourism. The possibilities for virtual reality smart cities are as endless as the Metaverse, and that’s a powerful engine to fuel a city’s ingenuity and expansion.

Schedule a meeting in VR to see Starmark’s portfolio of VR work and discuss how you can leverage VR for better productivity and increased sales.

6 Ways to Boost Creative with AI

You might be living under a rock if you haven’t been hearing all of the buzz about generative AI. It’s not coming, it’s already here – showing up in just about every facet of marketing, advertising, research and design. Even as we write this eTip, Google will have over 20 artificial intelligence products launching this year alone and ChatGPT is now the fastest-growing consumer app in history — reaching more than 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch. To put that in perspective, it took TikTok about nine months to reach 100 million users and Instagram 2½ years, according to data from Sensor Tower. Insert gasp here. OK, now reality check.

Game changers, it’s time to get your game on.

There is no denying that we are living in a transformative moment with powerful possibilities unfolding before our very eyes. For those of us born into the MTV generation, the big disruptor upon us feels a bit like “Video killed the radio star,” leaving us all wondering what will happen to marketing as we know it today. We are turning another corner just as we did with the dawn of the Internet and mobile phones. But what’s notably different is AI’s speed to market, and with it comes equal parts anticipation and trepidation. As marketers, strategists and creatives, we’re grappling with AI’s burgeoning potential and the need for guardrails.

So rather than sit on the sidelines, Starmark creative teams jumped in to break off a small bite and experiment with how AI can boost the creative process.

Here’s what we found:

1. AI as an idea accelerant

Tools like Chat GPT and Bard can be used for information gathering and starting points.

For writers and art directors, AI can help with some of the analytical, fact-based thinking that can oftentimes be time consuming. This, in turn, frees up brainpower to devote to emotive efforts, like empathetic storytelling. In other words, AI can scoop up the data, while creatives provide the soul.

For instance, we asked GPT-4 to provide a list of four new potential marketing eTip topics for AI and here’s what we got:

“Leveraging AI for Hyper-Personalized Marketing Campaigns”
“The Ethics of AI in Marketing: Balancing Personalization with Privacy”
“How AI is Revolutionizing Digital Advertising”
“The Future of AI in Marketing: Predictions and Trends to Watch”

Now it’s just a matter of a little bit of research on each topic and adding the soul to the material. It’s important to note that AI is only trained through 2021 at the moment, so topics like emerging trends will require deeper research beyond a basic prompt. But it does help mitigate some of the “blank canvas” effect creators may sometimes experience.

2. Busting strategy silos

The most successful B2C and B2B campaigns have human truths or insights at their core. We can see a use case for AI to help inform creative briefs, revealing those insights and customer pain points sooner to serve as a springboard for creative concepting.

So let’s say you’re working on a new assignment for a resort geared towards mid-30s couples. An AI tool can shed light on the kinds of things these couples are most concerned about so that these insights can inform an emotive aspirational campaign rather than just an ad series with product features alone. In theory, finding these nuggets early in the process will make the concepts resonate effectively with focus groups and cut down on the number of creative rounds.

And that’s just a starting point. AI can also be a powerful assistant to enrich market research efforts (i.e. gathering demographic data, competitive deep dives, customer journeys and more). It can be used to look at trends — and ultimately understand our customers better. That said, we would never use AI data without human vetting and interpretation because AI platforms are built on machine learning and algorithms — not a person with reasoning abilities. In short, the machine has no way to know if what it’s saying is right or wrong without a human fact-checker.

3. Back pocket sketch artist

Anything you can imagine is possible. You just need to know the right tools and prompts. Let’s say you’ve got an original concept that needs a key visual to express the big idea. Text to image tools like Midjourney, Dall-e or Stable Diffusion can be used to generate high quality visuals and storyboard frames. We’ve used these tools for pitching new ideas. The takeaway: these tools allowed us to iterate faster and get comps in front of clients more quickly.

Example shoot storyboard

A couple of caveats:

Because we’re generating custom imagery based on machine learning, sometimes the results can be a bit bizarre-o. For example, in one experiment, a random head was placed on a couch in the midst of a family gathering. Jeepers creepers. However, with some diligence finding the right prompts, the AI can yield viable results that can then be enhanced manually in Photoshop or Premiere to achieve the desired results. As we heard during this year’s MMA POSSIBLE conference, what AI doesn’t do well (because it doesn’t have the faculty) is human judgment. Taking AI raw product and shaping it into usable art requires human intervention and the talents of a live team. So while AI is a great tool for ideation – it is NOT a replacement for human creators.

One watchout is that AI output in its current form can lack diversity due to inherent bias reflected in the materials used to train these models. For instance, if you use a generic image prompt, such as ‘a man eating an ice cream cone’, the resulting image will likely be of a white man, even though the vast majority of men in the world are not white. We hope to see this improve as usage becomes more widespread and models are further refined to mitigate inherent training bias.

Another consideration is copyright. There are growing ethical debates surrounding style, derivative works and intellectual property. AI essentially pulls images and text from a whole-internet repository and then uses algorithms and patterns to repurpose elements and make predictions to create new combinations. Any art or text you create with AI could be subject to a copyright violation (or at the very least not be copyrightable) since most of these tools are scraping images from various sources. Certain companies are developing copyright-compliant solutions. Getty Images is training their AI only on images they own. Once this tool is launched, when you request the Getty AI to create an image, you would be able to buy the rights to use that image safely. With so much gooey gray area, we would err on the side of caution here when it comes to commercial usage of AI output.

4. Streamlining content creation

AI tools like Runway can speed up more labor intensive processes, like silhouetting images or video. So if we needed to move our subject from an office to an oasis, it’s possible to get there in a fraction of the time. Add to that, AI can bring efficiencies to repetitive tasks, like creating multiple versions of an asset. This means faster turnaround times for clients on the receiving end.

Runway: AI-powered video editor

The ad used to be the atomic unit of advertising — is it a good ad or a bad ad. Now we can pull the ad apart into its components — images and text — and let AI optimize those downstream assets more effectively.
— Ben Jones, Creative Director for Google Creative Works

It’s also possible to use AI to squeeze more life out of an existing asset library. There are tools that bring stills to life as animated videos, erase things from videos, swap backgrounds, colorize, stylize… the possibilities go on. We can even isolate one clip from an existing video and add slo mo to re-envision the clip as an entirely new vignette that hones in on just one powerful moment. Imagine what that can do for your content plan. We see this exploding in popularity.

5. Driving deeper video engagement and CX

There’s loads of possibilities for video, including text to video, which basically creates real motion based on user prompts. Software like Synthesia can even serve up an on-camera announcer that looks like a real talking person (although, there is no substituting a real human!). However, for quick-turn training and how-to videos, this could be a great way to deliver at scale.

Likewise, voice AI tools like ElevenLabs use speech synthesis to deliver voiceovers based on pure text inputs. While the results are impressive, we’d be remiss if we didn’t say that there is no substituting a real human! However, for quick-turn training and how-to videos, AI tools could be a great way to deliver at scale.

Once in the mindset of AI, we were able to brainstorm solutions that build better 1:1 interactions earlier in the customer journey. Let’s say we’re creating a new campaign to attract Meeting Planners to a destination. We can use an AI concierge in our videos and chatbots on our website to provide a seamless customer experience, increase brand loyalty and ultimately drive conversions with this highly targeted B2B audience.

Leaning in further to video engagement, there are also tools like Suggested Shorts that, as the name implies, uses AI to identify the most engaging moments from long-form videos to create high-impact short-form videos for YouTube. Based on insights from the AI tool, these new shorts have the propensity to perform better, driving more views and monetization.

There are other ways AI can help reach more screens with tools that translate videos into multiple language tracks. The list goes on. As this technology takes off, we can see content and lift increasing exponentially.

6. Co-creation takes center stage

In today’s media environment, consumers aren’t sitting back and receiving one-way messages from brands. Instead, they’re driving the conversation.

To capitalize on the trend, brands can use AI to build one-of-a kind experiences and community. Bain & Company launched its “Create Real Magic” campaign for Coca-Cola as an experiment to see how creative fans could co-create content with a platform built on open AI tools. Here, users can create their own works of art using AI trained on iconic Coca-Cola images. While the campaign is still in its infancy, this experiment demonstrates how campaigns may soon become more collaborative with brands and move even quicker.

Image via The Coca-Cola Company

In this same spirit of democratizing brand content, there’s fertile ground for purpose driven AI that can be used to serve the collective good of communities — collaborating for a cause. There’s also huge opportunities to use AI for Web3. Adidas ran a campaign where users completed personality questions to generate their own custom AI avatars, which were then imported into Metaverse worlds.

Humans, where do we go from here?

We’ve come to the understanding that we can be friends with generative AI. Not as a replacement for real writers, designers and strategists who spark the ideas and tell big stories. Instead, AI can serve as an incredibly useful tool to help bring efficiencies and inspiration to the creative process. Because, at the end of the day we follow our hearts, our humanity and our Starmark mantra: Let’s create the future.

If you’d like to learn more about AI or run an AI experiment to help achieve your goals, get in touch.

It’s an Island Thing

In a state with over 800 miles of beaches, how do you differentiate a single coastal destination from all the rest? Starmark’s new campaign for the Amelia Island Convention & Visitors Bureau (AICVB) delivered a fresh perspective to help the Northeast Florida barrier island stand out in a literal “sea of sameness.”

A campaign as unique as the destination it represents

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being on Amelia Island, so Starmark set out to encapsulate that feeling with the “It’s an Island thing” campaign. The team’s unique approach to storytelling framed the island around the vibe of “once you go, you get it” with sweeping vistas of its stunning topography. This showcased the destination’s natural beauty while conveying the indescribable feeling of being there.

Bringing Island Escapes Home with Weather-Triggered Ads

The Starmark team created two impactful ads tailored to audiences in colder weather cities, featuring classic winter imagery swiping to warm Amelia Island getaways. The icky winter highway ad ran when temperatures were merely in the normal winter range. The more extreme snow angel ad kicked in based on a weather trigger for extreme winter weather. Both ads feature beautiful imagery from the new campaign that showcase the best island experiences to get viewers dreaming of a getaway.

Mild Weather

Extreme Weather

Endless views from every direction

Videos were filmed using the latest drone technology to capture a bird’s-eye view of the island in all directions. This footage complemented the street-level vignettes that were also filmed. The idea was to highlight the beaches to the east and the marshes to the west, and all the island charms in between.

With a five-day production schedule, Starmark and AICVB were able to build a dynamic content library in various sizes and formats, all of which were mobile-first. View some of the highlights below.

Island Thing is designed to bring to life the duality of a remote escape that’s still easily accessible. The campaign execution is built on mini-storylines that reveal epic views in all directions. Our campaign really reflects the natural beauty of Amelia Island.
— Dale Baron, Starmark VP, Executive Creative Director

Sky-high results

To date, over 200 digital assets have been developed to support AICVB’s website, digital media buy, social media and e-newsletters. And the results are even more impressive. Overall, the campaign has consistently performed 15 times higher than industry benchmarks on average. It has generated more than 36 million impressions, nearly 449,283 clicks, and a 1.25% click-through-rate. For print publications, circulation was 2,935,168.

We’ve always known Amelia Island is a special place. There’s no other place in Florida quite like it. This new campaign tells our island story, with captivating video that covers what our destination has to offer.
— Gil Langley, AICVB President & CEO

For more on the Amelia Island “It’s an Island thing” campaign, watch the behind the scenes below.

Creating more Play+ fans with an entirely new customer data ecosystem

Great things are possible when you really know your customers. And that’s the power we unleashed for Sightline Payments — leading to a higher customer lifetime value, increased account retention and a consistent communication strategy.

So how’d we cement the position of Play+ as the smarter way to play with both gaming partners and customers? Well, it all started with a Herculean data effort.

The Ante — Setting the Stage for Our Effort

Sightline Payments is a leader in digital payment technology. Their product, Play+, provides a safe and convenient way to fund casino gaming, sports betting and everyday purchases without any cash.

When Play+ came to Starmark, it had a few years of customer data, several loyal casino and sportsbook partners and a big challenge of increasing usage and account-holder retention.

Thanks to financial service standards and reporting requirements, Play+ had a robust customer database, but the previous customer service communications system wasn’t maintained and optimized for marketing communications. There were also two evident and troubling trends: 1) A large number of sign-ups that never became transactions; 2) A large percentage of accounts showing a trend of initial Play+ account use, followed by a steady decline in use until they lapsed.

The data also wasn’t being used for any comarketing efforts with the casinos and sportsbooks with whom Play+ partners.

Our goal was to create, test and optimize a data-driven marketing program, for both B2B and B2C efforts, to improve account usage and increase per-account lifetime value.

This system gives us real visibility into our marketing activities and our accountholder communications. It’s a major step forward for us.
— Mandi Hart, Chief Client Solutions Officer, Sightline Payments

The Wager — Defining Our Customer Data Strategy

Our first step was to define the tech stack for the program, which included choosing the perfect CRM, data lake and data warehouse for Sightline Payments’ marketing data. Then our team extracted, transformed and loaded (ETL) all historical customer data, including lapsed accounts.

The customer data strategy for Play+ included understanding past customer behavior to predict future trends. To find our key insights, we mined three years of customer data, appended it with third-party data and compared those results to our own customer survey data. Through the survey, we learned what benefits of Play+ were most important to customers and what worked great — and not so great — about finding and becoming a new customer of Play+.

This effort yielded three essential tools: 1) a proprietary customer lifetime value (LTV) model and; 2) data-driven customer personas and journeys to translate our findings into real human personalities and experiences for our various customer segments; and; 3) a message map aligned with the top-rated customer benefits.

The propensity data modeling definitely made our media efforts more efficient.
— Tom Sears, Executive Vice President, Sightline Payments

The Raise — Leveraging Insights to Create More Effective Communications

After analyzing all the data, we realized people didn’t choose Play+ because it was more secure or because it was easy to sign up or because it had a debit card with it. The real reason they chose Play+ and kept using it was because payouts take only minutes, versus days for other payment methods.

With this clear customer understanding, we had everything we needed to craft a successful acquisition and retention roadmap.

Table Stakes — Getting the Fundamentals Right

Our roadmap included a new, automated welcome drip program for new account sign-ups. The campaign specifically addressed many of the triggers, timings and behaviors we learned about in our data modeling exercise that prevented declining usage and led to high lifetime value.

The River — New Opportunities Flowing

The same findings also allowed us to create campaigns for new customer acquisition and lapsed customer reactivation. Then we tested these new targeting capabilities to create a pilot acquisition campaign in Michigan. In comparison to previous new state launches, this data-powered Michigan launch saw 112% greater market penetration in the first 90 days. Additionally, 76% of new accounts were traceable back to the marketing effort — a massive shift in attribution capabilities.

These learnings helped us immensely when we launched an interactive NCAA Playoff campaign to re-engage basketball fans with little to no account activity since the previous season. Animated gifs and tailor-made messaging encouraging fans to play along to win a $500 prize. Everything we learned from these efforts helped us pull off an award-winning football season effort that led to thousands of new sign-ups.

The Draw — Bringing in New Fans in Las Vegas

When Play+ had an opportunity to work with close partner Resorts World Las Vegas to launch the world’s first cashless casino, the Starmark team used our data-driven creative approach to develop high-impact on-property promotions, employee training and a sign-up team strategy.

Prior to the resort opening, we deployed a building-sized animated promotion inviting The Strip to come in and experience the world’s first cashless casino. We paired this massive effort with large animated monument signs at sidewalk level.

In partnership with the Play+ team, we workshopped a fluid online sign-up process and supplemented the effort with helpful onboarding videos to assist with every step. We also created an on-property lounge area to assist with in-person sign-ups. Signage on the casino floor, in-room promotions and large-scale sizzle videos promoted the cashless Play+ solution to everyone on property.

The Call — Creating Excellent Partnerships

Consistent and cohesive partner marketing with the 100+ partners throughout the US was also a critical channel. So the Starmark team also created essential business fundamentals for Play+ — messaging documents, a design system for digital products, a marketing automation system, brand guidelines and a huge family of templates.

One of the most critical pieces of these efforts was an “operator toolkit” for all Play+ casino and sportsbook partners. The online toolkit included comarketing templates, useful brand information and everything else a Play+ partner would need to create successful Play+ marketing. It included customizable online cardholder portals, a system to upload customized Play+ card art and other goodies for every partner to make Play+ feel like their own.

We included everything from social media assets to SMS messaging to make it easy for any partner — big or small — to use pre-approved communications for quick-turn promotions that stayed brand-consistent.

The Final Take

Over the course of two years, we created infrastructure to ramp up acquisition and reactivation marketing. We launched entirely new markets and the world’s first cashless casino experience. We buttoned up the creative approach with consumer insights, and we created a consistent brand toolkit. In the end, these efforts led to a fresh investment in Sightline Payments, bringing the company’s valuation of over $1 billion.

The State of Virtual Reality in Education: March 2023

The benefits of virtual reality in education are numerous. And that’s part of the reason some states are offering grants and including education budget funding to bring this technology to classrooms, campuses and remote learners. For non-linear learning environments, better engagement, endless creativity, connecting online students to their campus culture (and even organic uses students will teach us along the way), nothing beats the possibilities of VR for education. So we’re making a list of what’s here today – and what’s just ahead – for education VR.

Learning Outcome Benefits of Virtual Reality in Education

Virtual reality is great at a lot of things in education. It can easily transport a user to harsh or remote locations: an underwater reef, Mars, or Antarctica. It is also great at transporting people through time, whether to study ancient Rome, Egypt, a Mayan civilization or more recent history.

Several studies have been conducted by colleges that are early adopters of virtual reality and those that received grants to study virtual reality outcomes.

One of those early adopters is Dr. Mushina Morris from Morehouse College, who received a grant to investigate educational results with VR. The research compared in-person learning to online learning to virtual reality learning across three categories: attendance, engagement and achievement.

We developed an asynchronous virtual reality course…that was tethered to the next generation science standards. They LOVED it! We started to see student achievement increase by 11.9%, student attendance rate increase by 10%, students were not withdrawn at all…so we saw increases across the board.
— Dr. Mushina Morris, Morehouse College

As were many colleges and universities, Morehouse College was faced with several COVID-19-related educational challenges, like low student engagement and poor participation via Zoom. Dr. Morris and her colleagues decided to try something new. They applied for a grant enabling them to launch a pandemic “Metaversity-style” learning atmosphere using virtual reality and avatars to teach their courses.

What did they discover? Student attendance, engagement, and achievement increased across the board. They also saw notable overall improvements among students with learning challenges, including a young man whose speech impediment became non-existent when attending class in the Metaversity. Though he had difficulty presenting his classwork in real life, when he presented as his avatar, he had flawless diction and speech. He reported feeling much more at ease in the Metaverse, stating, “I felt like you all saw me differently, and I saw myself differently.”

So, according to Dr. Morris, education via the Metaverse truly works. Here are the results of her study:

We should note: there’s still some novelty to VR for students who’ve never tried it. So curiosity may have helped boost the numbers in this early study. Nevertheless, these initial results are compelling.

Purdue also did an amazing research study to compare education when reading, watching a video, and using Augmented Reality. This study was designed to measure how efficiently learners were able to complete tasks using instruction through written paper instructions, video instructions and augmented reality instructions.

The difference in time it took learners to follow AR directions are startling. Of course, we would expect augmented reality to outperform paper instructions, but video, which has long been considered a superior way to learn, significantly underperformed versus AR.

Microsoft, maker of the HoloLens mixed reality device, is also interested in this area of research. In its own study the company found a 22% improvement in student test scores and a 35% increase in student engagement and retention of material when learning through spatial computing versus conventional methods. For a full rundown of the findings, check out their white paper on Mixed Reality for Education.

Diversity and Representation in Virtual Reality

Representation matters – no matter the platform. Unfortunately, even in a progressive space, such as virtual technology, we have a long way to go when it comes to inclusivity of race, ethnicity, gender, disabilities and more.

From a lack of diversity in culturally appropriate avatar options to limited accessibility resources for disabled folks, a more inclusive Metaverse for people of all backgrounds is sorely needed.

A focus on inclusivity is at the heart of development of the Engage metaworld. The company has greatly enhanced their avatar system, allowing students to create self images that are authentic and comfortable, while still giving them the flexibility to envision themselves as historians, professors, astronauts and more.

Creating your own avatar system would be a massive undertaking we would never recommend. However, developers of avatar systems are receptive to user feedback and actively working to improve their platforms. If you feel your platform does not allow users to “see themselves” in their avatars, let the developers know!

Existing tools are already making this goal of inclusivity easier. The Open Source Afro Hair Library is available for developers. It is a free, user-friendly, highly curated 3D model database of Black hairstyles and textures that serves as a feminist, anti-racist resource for digital artists and 3D content creators. Their website states: “Functioning as both art practice and technological development, the Open Source Afro Hair Library seeks to address the lack of thoughtful representation of Blackness in games, virtual/augmented reality, and other 3D media.”

Virtual Reality and the Future of Higher Education Campuses

Many colleges and universities are creating virtual campuses in virtual reality. These campuses are a great place for students to gather, meet, socialize, and feel connected to the school, especially those who are mostly remote, commuter or online learners.

But what’s even more surprising are the organic, emergent uses for these campus spaces that students are coming up with on their own.

Students at Morehouse college started to use their digital campus for study sessions, even when the students themselves were sitting in their dorm rooms (sometimes at 2:00 a.m.). Students also spawned Meditation Mondays, ad-hoc club gatherings and many other uses.

It’s amazing the creativity that happens when an institution creates an open, collaborative environment by and for students. Ultimately, it’s what makes a metacampus an even more valuable digital tool.

To Digital Twin, or Not?

At its core, a digital campus should be three-dimensional, persistent, interactive and social. This social aspect is particularly important – because there’s nothing fun or compelling about walking around an empty campus.

Likewise, a digital campus should not start & end, or be linear. The best VR campuses create continuous experiences, open environments, promote exploration and discovery.

A Digital Twin is an exact representation of a real-life location in virtual reality. There is some debate as to if this is the best approach. Sure, a digital twin is easy to relate to, familiar to users, and has already been designed, so you just need to make a copy. It’s not a particularly creative exercise.

Now, if you’re thinking the relatively straightforward exercise of creating a digital twin campus might be a great way to dip your toe into VR while still being on the cutting edge, think again. As part of an effort to kickstart its VR education program Meta has already funded the creation of several digital twin campuses, including: University of Kansas School of Nursing, New Mexico State University, South Dakota State University, Florida A&M University, West Virginia University, University of Maryland Global Campus, Southwestern Oregon Community College, California State University, Dominquez Hills, and Alabama A&M University.

There are some specific uses where a digital twin makes sense – like training and orientation on a specific location or facility. Operating rooms and airplane cockpits are two prime examples where VR should reflect actual reality as closely as possible. But when it comes to a college campus, the values of dynamism and discovery definitely outweigh familiarity. A digital twin simply doesn’t take advantage of what this medium can offer.

What to consider when planning your VR education experiment

If you’re looking to create a new campus in VR, create interpretations of your campus that stretch the bounds of conventional reality. Make something that feels like an extension (skeuomorphism, anyone?). After all, what is right in real life may not be that great in virtual reality.

Make sure your plan is fun and interactive. Any campus, whether physical or virtual, should be the kind of place where people can meet, musicians can perform, artists can create, sports can be enjoyed, games are played and a sense of discovery is at the heart of every experience (hint: don’t forget to include a few Easter eggs for curious users). Make your digital campus easy to learn, hard to master. Surprise and delight will make people want to keep discovering, tell their friends and come back over and over again.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. Check out these colleges who are really taking advantage of the medium:

New Frontiers

The end users for VR in education are all digital natives. These students grew up with technology. For them, this transition is completely intuitive, natural and expected. It’s administrators and educators who really have the learning curve. In the past year, I’ve had over 50 meetings in VR with education institutions, helping them get hands-on with the future. If you’re curious, get in touch.
— Brett Circe, Starmark Chief Digital Officer

There’s far more to think through when bringing VR to any academic institution. If you’re not sure where to start, we can help you roadmap ways to increase student engagement, raise your profile, attract more applicants and improve educational outcomes. Sound good? Then use the form below to schedule a meeting in VR.

Schedule a meeting in VR

Baking Spirits Bright

Welcome to the Starmark Kitchen.

It’s time to sprinkle, twinkle and shine. Let’s satisfy that sweet tooth of yours with some holiday cookie goodness. Enjoy these savory recipes from our team members to help you celebrate the season. Happy Holidays.

Madeleines Pistachio Star Cookies Hanukkah Rugelach Cookies Cowboy Cookies Sugar Cookies No-Bake Cookies Peanut Butter and Pumpkin Doggie Cookies

Madeleines

Yields about 2 dozen

Ingredients

Madeleine pans
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled, plus more for pans
3/4 cup all-purpose flour, plus more for pans
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest

Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter and flour Madeleine pans thoroughly. Melt butter and let it cool.
In a medium bowl beat eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest with an electric mixer on high speed for 5 minutes. Gradually beat in the confectioners’ sugar. Beat for 5-7 minutes or until thick and satiny. Sift together the flour and baking powder. Sift 1/4 of the flour mixture over the egg mixture, gently fold in using a spatula. Fold in the remaining flour by fourths. Then fold in the melted and cooled butter.
Spoon batter into prepared Madeleine pans, filling 3/4 full. Bake until golden, about 7 minutes. Remove from pans. Cool on racks.

Pistachio Star Cookies (Zimtsterne, German cinnamon star cookies)

Traditionally these cookies are made with almonds, but we’ve substituted with one of our favorite nuts, pistachios!

Ingredients

Cookies

4-2/3 cup of roasted pistachios (lightly salted)
3-3/4 cup of confectioners’ sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 large egg whites (no yolk!)

Meringue

1 large egg white
1 cup confectioners’ sugar

Directions

Preheat oven to 300 degrees; Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

Cookies

Grind the pistachios in a food processor until fine.
Add 2-3/4 cups of the confectioners’ sugar and the cinnamon.
Pulse to make a fine powder.
Add the egg whites and process until the dough comes together.
Sprinkle a work surface with the remaining 1 cup of confectioners’ sugar. Knead the dough on the surface to create a cohesive dough. Roll out the dough until 1⁄4 inch thick, making sure the surface and rolling pin are coated with confectioners’ sugar to keep the dough from sticking. Cut out cookies with a 2-inch star cookie cutter, dipping the cutter into the confectioners’ sugar every now and again to keep the dough from sticking. Place the cookies about 1⁄2 inch apart on the pans. Gather the dough scraps, then reroll and cut out more stars.

Meringue

Whisk the egg white in a metal bowl until medium-stiff peaks form. Whisk in the confectioners’ sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, until thick and smooth (it’s OK if the meringue doesn’t hold a peak). Drop a teaspoon of meringue onto the middle of each cookie and use the back of a spoon to spread it.
Bake the cookies for 15- 17 minutes, or until the edges of the meringue barely start to color.
Cool 5 minutes on the baking sheets, transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Hanukkah Rugelach Cookies

Makes 18–22

Ingredients

2½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
¼ tsp. baking powder
½ cup granulated sugar, divided
2 tsp. kosher salt, divided
1 cup chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces
8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
Zest of 1 orange
1½ cups finely chopped walnuts
1 cup raspberry or any other flavor jam or marmalade
½ cup freeze-dried raspberries or strawberries
1 large egg, beaten to blend

Special Equipment

A spice mill or mortar and pestle

Directions

Mix flour, baking powder, ¼ cup granulated sugar, and 1 tsp. salt in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment on low speed to combine. Add butter and beat until it is flattened into nickel- and dime-size pieces and dry ingredients look a bit like sand, about 2 minutes. Cut cream cheese into 8–10 pieces and add all at once to mixer. Beat until dough starts to clump together in pieces (but not so long that it forms one large mass) with pieces of butter and some cream cheese still visible, about 1 minute longer.
Turn out dough onto a work surface and divide in half. Pat each into a disk and wrap tightly in plastic. Chill just until firm, 30–45 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix together orange zest, nuts, jam, and remaining 1 tsp. salt in a medium bowl. Set filling aside.
Working one at a time, roll out dough between 2 lightly floured sheets of parchment paper, dusting with more flour and turning over and rotating as needed, into ⅛”-thick ovals about 18×11″. Spread half of filling over each oval, leaving a ½” border. Rotate dough so a long side is closest to you and roll up into a tight spiral, using parchment to help you lift it as you go. If dough is sticking, chill 5 minutes before proceeding. Chill rolled-up dough until firm, at least 60 minutes and up to 1 day (wrapped in plastic).
Place racks in upper and lower thirds of oven; preheat to 375°. Finely grind raspberries in spice mill or with mortar and pestle. Transfer to a small bowl; mix in remaining ¼ cup granulated sugar. Brush tops of dough with egg. Sprinkle with half of berry sugar and cut into wedges 2″ wide at the base and ½” wide at the point. Make each cut on a diagonal, changing direction each time so that short and wide ends alternate. Divide rugelach between 2 parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake, rotating baking sheets top to bottom and front to back halfway through, until deep golden brown, 28–34 minutes. Let cool on baking sheets, sprinkling with remaining berry sugar while still warm.
Do Ahead: Cookies can be baked 5 days ahead. Store airtight at room temperature.

Cowboy Cookies

Ingredients

2.5 cups oatmeal, blended
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, room temp
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
12 oz. (2 cups) chocolate chips
1 (4 oz.) Hershey’s bar, grated
1.5 cups chopped nuts (optional, but REALLLYYY good with)

Directions

Preheat oven to 374 degrees F
Blend oatmeal: measure and process in a blender to a coarse powder
In a medium bowl, mix together flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and baking soda
In the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugars on medium-high speed until light and fluffy
Beat in the eggs and vanilla until well-blended, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed
Add flour mixture; mix until just blended. Stir in chocolate chips, grated chocolate, and nuts (if using)
OPTIONAL, BUT DEFINITELY SUGGESTED: cover dough and chill for 30 minutes (add 1 minutes or 2 of cook time if using chilled dough)
Roll dough into balls and place two inches apart on cookie sheet
Bake for 10 minutes
Take cookies out of over 1 or 2 minutes before the cookies are cooked, since they’ll continue to cook on the baking pans
Let cookies cookie for two minutes on baking sheet before transferring to rack to cool completely.
Serve with vanilla ice cream on the side and enjoy!

Sugar Cookies

Makes 2 dozen

Ingredients

Cookie Dough

3 c. all-purpose flour, plus more for surface
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1 c. (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 c. granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1 tbsp. milk

Buttercream Frosting

1 c. (2 sticks) butter, softened
5 c. powdered sugar
1/4 c. heavy cream
1/2 tsp. pure almond extract
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
Food coloring

Directions

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside.
In another large bowl, beat butter and sugar until fluffy and pale in color. Add egg, milk, and vanilla and beat until combined, then add flour mixture gradually until totally combined.
Shape into a disk and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate 1 hour.
When ready to roll, preheat oven to 350º and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Lightly flour a clean work surface and roll out dough until 1/8” thick. Cut out shapes and transfer to prepared baking sheets. Freeze 10 minutes (so your shapes hold while baking!).
Meanwhile, make frosting: In a large bowl using a hand mixer, beat butter until smooth, then add powdered sugar and beat until no lumps remain. Add cream, almond extract, and salt and beat until combined.
Bake cookies until edges are lightly golden, 8 to 10 minutes.
Let cool, then frost and decorate as desired.

No-Bake Cookies

There is always a lot of cooking and baking around the holidays. What is great about these cookies is that they kinda just fit right in with everything else you are doing, like a byproduct of all your efforts is rewarded with cookies!

Preparation

While you’re doing your other baking, save any egg whites that may be left over from other recipes.
Have these cookies ready to go when the rest of your baking is done when you shut your oven off (we will use the heat left in the oven after you turn it off!)

Ingredients

Egg whites
Sugar
Vanilla (or mint) extract
Pinch of salt
Chocolate chips
Nuts (Optional)

Directions

Use a mixer to beat the egg whites.
Slowly add sugar until it stiffens and has peaks.
Stir in the vanilla and a pinch of salt.
Fold in the chocolate chips (and nuts if you want to).
Stir with a spatula. Line a baking tray with aluminum foil and drop mounds about 2 inches apart.
When you remove your last item from the oven and turn the oven off for the night, put this tray in there when you do. Ensure the oven is off, and let this tray sit in the oven overnight (do not open the oven to check on it, or the heat will escape).
In the morning, you’ll be rewarded with a batch of light and crisp, yummy cookies!

Peanut Butter and Pumpkin Doggie Cookies

Approx 25 treats

Ingredients

2 ½ cups whole wheat flour
2 large eggs
½ cup canned pumpkin
2 tablespoons natural peanut butter (avoid peanut butters that contain Xylitol)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon water, or more if necessary (Optional)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
Combine flour, eggs, pumpkin, peanut butter, salt, and cinnamon in a bowl; stir until combined.
Transfer mixture to a work surface and work it with your hands until mixture starts to come together. Add 1 teaspoon water at a time (only if needed) to help make the dough workable, but don’t add too much as it should be dry and stiff.
Roll the dough to a thickness of 1/2 inch. Cut into 1/2-inch pieces and transfer to a baking sheet.
Bake in the preheated oven until dog treats are golden brown and crunchy, about 40 minutes. Let cool before serving to your dog.

Starmark Earns Platinum and Gold Hermes Creative Awards

Starmark’s creative excellence shines on in 2022, with recognition by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, sponsors of the Hermes Creative Awards. One of the oldest and largest creative competitions in the world, Hermes honors messengers and creators from around the world who bring fresh ideas to life in digital and traditional media.

Platinum: Amelia Island Weather-Triggered Campaign

To make Amelia Island, Florida, stand apart from other warm weather destinations at the height of the winter season, we leveraged our blue skies, beaches and quaint island surroundings in a different way. We partnered with PadSquad to implement digital ad technology that would enable us to show specific immersive ads triggered by cold weather events. The execution was dazzling and so were the results. So much so that this year the Amelia Island Weather Trigger campaign also won two gold Addy awards and Best of Interactive.

Platinum: NextTrip Journeys Campaign

NextTrip Journeys is a luxury travel planning/concierge brand that curates personalized vacation experiences for destinations spanning the globe. Our award-winning campaign concept — “Dreamed by you. Designed by us.” — captured the vacation imagination of our audience with aspirational copy and images that strategically gave consumers a clear idea of the brand’s accommodating function and role, while playing up the dream phase of planning a vacation.

The campaign was delivered via display ads, and paid social videos. We also created a series of dynamic Facebook ads with copy that appealed to different personas.

Platinum: Charter Schools USA Campaign

Home to more than 75,000 K-12 students at nearly 100 schools across five states, Charter Schools USA is one of the biggest, highest performing education management companies in the country. Together with Starmark they’ve now created a cohesive, consistent marketing approach, including a centralized digital strategy to boost leads and enrollments.

Facebook ads and forms, paid search ads and display ads drove prospects to each school’s landing page, capturing user data for follow-up. We also helped Charter Schools USA launch new schools by creating Instant Experience ads that provided users with in-depth information and visuals.

Gold: Play+ Football Campaign

Play+ is a digital tool that empowers users to fund their sports book account and get instant payouts with just their phone. In other words, it takes the wait out of winning. To bring this idea to life Starmark created a campaign that featured a pair of Play+ football players to show users how easy it is to “Score instant access to your winnings.” The campaign burst onto social, display and streaming networks with various executions that generated excitement as well as clicks. During the five-month campaign, Play+ got 150,000 new signups.

Gold: Amelia Island Meetings Campaign

As travel and business operations started to resume following the pandemic, meeting planners needed to reshuffle, replan and rebook events that were put on hold. We wanted meeting planners to know that on Amelia Island, Florida, they would find “Island Inspired Meetings.” We created an integrated meetings B2B campaign utilizing headlines that put a twist on meeting terms, while pairing them with images of the island’s tranquil outdoor settings.

The “Island Inspired Meetings“ video showcased the best of this one-of-a-kind island. Other campaign elements included social media in-feed videos, story ads and an Instant Experience ad that captured the essence and charm of the destination.

Honorable Mentions for Branding, Digital Ads and Interactive

Starmark produced a lot of work to be proud of this past year — work that made an impact for our clients. In addition to our six Hermes trophies, the agency earned an Honorable Mention for our branding work for TalentForge, a Broward County initiative that connects young adults with area employers for real-world work experiences. Our Momentum campaign for the University of Florida also earned two Honorable Mentions for digital marketing and a landing page.

“We are humbled to achieve such creative recognition for our clients across so many disciplines and verticals. There’s nothing we love more than turning high performing campaigns into big wins — and then investing our learnings back into the work!”
— Dale Baron, Starmark Executive Creative Director

Higher Education, Travel & Hospitality, and B2B Sales Case Studies for Doing Business in the Metaverse

We know the Metaverse and Web3 are taking over the B2C marketing world, but what about when it comes to B2B, education, and travel? We explored these topics in our final live session, “Case Studies of How To Do Business using Web3 and the Metaverse,” which examined three unique case studies: one focused on higher education with Morehouse College’s VR expert, Muhsinah Morris; another uncovering travel and hospitality learnings Metaverse Hospitality’s Tommy Farr, and a unique B2B sales opportunity with Nick Romeo of Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures. The results? Extremely impactful. Let’s dive a little deeper, shall we?

Metaversity Learning Works

According to Dr. Morris, education via the Metaverse truly works! As were many colleges and universities, Morehouse College was faced with several COVID-19-related educational challenges, like low student engagement and participation via Zoom. Dr. Morris and her colleagues decided to try something new. They applied for a grant enabling them to launch a pandemic “Metaversity-style” learning atmosphere using virtual reality and avatars to teach their courses.

What did they discover? Student attendance, engagement, and achievement increased across the board.

They also saw notable improvement with students with learning challenges’ overall performances, including a young man whose speech impediment became non-existent in the Metaverse. Though he had difficulty presenting his classwork in real life, when he presented as his avatar, he had flawless diction and speech. He conveyed feeling much more at ease and comfortable in the Metaverse, stating, “I felt like you all saw me differently and I saw myself differently.”

Inclusivity is Still Lacking

Representation matters — no matter the platform. Unfortunately, even in a progressive world such as virtual technology, we have a long way to go when it comes to inclusivity in regards to race, ethnicity, gender, people with disabilities, and more. From a lack of diversity in culturally appropriate avatar options to limited rehabilitation resources for disabled folks, Dr. Morris and her team pushed the developers towards providing a more inclusive Metaverse for people of all backgrounds. This paid off in the Engage Metaworld, which greatly enhanced their Avatars to allow students to create self images of themselves that they felt were authentic and comfortable, some even envisioning themselves as historians, professors, etc.

Meta-Travel

So, how does the Metaverse apply to travel and hospitality? For starters, hotels are using VR for employee training, concierges are using it to conduct virtual tours which lead to real-life hotel bookings. Once travel and hospitality guru, Tommy Farr of Metaverse Hospitality, saw opportunities in his field, his company built a business hotel with a conference center and meeting rooms; a hip hotel with a nightclub DJ and lounge; and a vacation hotel complete with a pool, golf course and spa! Who else is ready for a virtual vacation?

Metaverse B2B is the Bee’s Knees

Curious how B2B sales translates into the Metaverse? So were we. That’s why we chatted with Nick Romeo, Sales Director at Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures. After COVID-19 put travel and tourism on the back burner, tour operators were in trouble and FAM tours came to a screeching halt. Since 75% of Romeo’s business consists of European travelers, they needed to find a safer, more cost-effective way to show off their attraction to prospects and travel agents around the world.

Enter: Starmark. Our agency built a Metaworld (AKA Meta-attraction) for Boggy Creek to conduct business in. Instead of agents traveling to Orlando for a tour, Romeo could safely “walk” his European clients through the park virtually at a fraction of the cost. He could also use these virtual tours to introduce clients to the park’s new butterfly pavilion — opening this fall and built entirely in VR way ahead of time to conduct pre-sales. This became a B2B sales effort to try to get more buy-in and excitement from travel agencies that would ultimately drive more bookings world-wide.

The results are still rolling in, but so far they’re faring well and setting themselves apart from other Orlando competitors.

High Risk, High Reward

Our expert, Tommy Farr, acknowledges the inherent risks in building an immature platform and realizes that sometimes you make big investments, only to get the “carpet pulled from under you,” as our host, Dan Grech, puts it. Unfortunately, after investing over 10K in virtual hotels, one of Meta Hospitality’s Metaworlds utilizing NFTs got shut down due to regulations. But according to all of our experts, this experimental phase is bound to have some growing pains.

Corporations are consistently “falling” or “failing forward” (as Dr. Morris calls it) by testing the waters and laying the framework for others. Once perfected, it’s bound to take off — likely with a company we’ve never even heard of yet. Just because big players like Meta broke the internet with Web2 and Facebook, that certainly doesn’t mean they will dominate Web3 and Metaverse in the future. It could be one of your businesses instead!

So, what’s the consensus? Operating your business in Web3 and the Metaverse is a big investment, with a potentially huge payoff. Dan Grech recaps the conversation nicely: “What we’re seeing are examples of early adopters — people spending time and money, risking falling forward, but immediately differentiating themselves from the competition and putting themselves in a position to be ready for Web3, which is inevitable and coming.” So, is it worth it? That’s a BIG yes from us.

For more on Case Studies and other business endeavors in Web3 and the Metaverse, watch our entire series on Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse.

How to Engage Employees & Recruit Talent Using the Metaverse

The hiring process is broken. Too many good candidates are getting overlooked for the wrong reasons and compatible career matches are dwindling. The problem? No concrete data. In our third webinar session of the four-part series, “Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse,” we chatted with Scoutible founder and CEO, Angela Antony, and Starmark’s Chief Digital Officer, Brett Circe, to learn more about talent recruitment and employee engagement in the Metaverse. Here’s what we discovered:

What’s Scoutible?

Angela Antony was looking for ways to improve the hiring game, so she invented her company, Scoutible; an innovative platform that uses award-winning gaming technology and data (developed by Harvard and Stanford scientists) to help people identify their professional skills, styles, strengths and passions in an engaging, accurate way. Once discovered, skills are used to empower candidates to find the right job for them and vice versa — all regardless of educational backgrounds or prior work experiences. Scoutible’s Meta world is currently in beta and we can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Beyond the Resume

According to Antony, “By creating a gamified solution, we can harvest the soft skills that matter most in the Metaverse and create real-life opportunities.” The game measures a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses to understand their professional styles. This way, everyone is seen for their strengths. Based on a resume alone, certain people would not have even been brought to the table. But thanks to Scoutible, they have been found as top performers in their field. Now, candidates can be hired for their skill sets over anything else.

A New Form of Head Hunting

Scoutible is also working to find people that fit the employer’s profile at a lower cost due to its accuracy and efficiency. For example, over 900 applications were placed for an engineering position, but there was one leading applicant over hundreds of Ivy leaguers: a full-time auto mechanic that taught themselves to code at night. This person may have easily been overlooked in a traditional hiring process. Antony makes an interesting point in that the employer or the prospective employee makes the decision for the job in the first ten seconds, meaning that first impressions are incredibly impactful. So, from a diversity, inclusion and belonging standpoint, the Metaverse really eliminates unconscious bias, as well as geographical barriers with its digital representation of the professional world. This enables companies to hire candidates based on their strengths instead of locations or resumes.

VR Brought the Culture Back

COVID-19 posed massive challenges to businesses world-wide. How will companies maintain a team when everyone is remote? Can coworkers really connect through Zoom? Brett Circe’s Starmark decided to roll with the punches and face the issues head-on — literally. They sent all employees (AKA Starmarkers) Oculus Quest 2 headsets. How did they train up their staff? By having them attend a virtual holiday tree trimming party dedicated to teaching them how to use VR. Brett recounted that the holidays are a great time to bring coworkers together to connect and unwind in fun and festive virtual environments — each that were a surprise to the teams every time. Thanks to holiday parties, happy hours, and hangouts in VR, Starmark’s culture was able to make the comeback it needed to post-pandemic.

VIRTUAL COLLABORATION

Of course the Metaverse has its advantages and disadvantages, but Circe finds that when employees wear the headset, they are fully immersed in meetings — without email, text or chat distractions. Starmark practices Agile Methodology, which heavily emphasizes individual interactions and collaboration over products and tools, and VR is the perfect place to gather for their “sprint retrospectives.” These “retros” are where teams celebrate their accomplishments, and debrief on their most recent sprint (the last two week’s worth of work). Upon going remote, each retro meeting has been held in different VR environments that generate more conversation and better focus than other virtual predecessors like Zoom or Google Hangouts. Starmarkers are finding collaborative projects in the metaverse to be increasingly fruitful, productive and as a bonus, downright fun — as long as you keep a straw nearby to hydrate.

Want to learn more about the Metaverse and Web3? Check out our full series, Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse, for tips on how to market your business holistically in a virtual world.

What You Need to Know About Finance & Legal in Web3

With a new world comes new currencies, transactions and laws. So, what does that mean for Web3 and the Metaverse? Since companies are now using NFTs to sell products, education, travel, and real estate, it’s time for businesses and marketers to hop on the bandwagon. A little intimidated by all this? Don’t worry. We asked WGMI Media CEO, Brett Malinowski, and Winston and Strawn’s Blockchain guru, Kimberly Prior, for some guidance in our second webinar, “The Financial and Legal Implications of Web3 for Business.”

A little intimidated by all this? Don’t worry. We’re here to break it all down for you.

THE BASICS

Blockchain. NFTs. Cryptocurrencies. Learn the terms to understand our new reality.

Cryptocurrency: Decentralized (AKA not owned by a bank or corporation) digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography. Cryptocurrencies run on a distributed public ledger called blockchain, a record of all transactions updated and held by currency holders.

Blockchain: What cryptocurrencies run on — a digitally distributed, decentralized public ledger that facilitates the process of recording the tracking transactions and assets. Similar to a public database, it can be audited by anyone. But it cannot be edited.

NFTs: Non-fungible tokens. A record on a blockchain associated with a specific digital or physical asset (started with art). It can be owned, sold and/or traded.

New Drop: A business launching a “new drop,” just means they are “dropping” a new, usually exclusive NFT collection of digital wearables (similar to a loyalty rewards program).

WEB3 BUT MAKE IT FASHION

According to Brett Malinowski, NFTs are the biggest opportunities of our lifetime because Web3 is about ownership by the people. Blockchain and NFTs are the infrastructure that makes this possible. You own your data, and you can sell it if you choose. You can buy, own and sell NFTs too, which can connect to both the digital and real world.

Fashion brands like Nike are starting to explore digital commerce with NFTs that have both digital and physical components. For example, if you want to dress up your digital avatar in Roblox with new Nikes, you can pay for the drop, and they will send you exclusive new pairs of digital kicks for your avatar, as well as physicals pair in real life. Pretty awesome.

ART PROVENANCE & COLLECTABLES

Is that an original Dali or a knockoff? People have been using art as a commodity since the beginning of time. What’s fantastic about Web3 technology is that blockchain establishes provenance (the history of ownership), so this was a natural place to start for artists.

Another trade that’s ripe for the NFT space are collectables. Stamps, Pokemon, and sports cards are becoming more popular in Web3 and becoming gamified in the digital space. As in real life, the rarer the card, the more money it’s worth. As a bonus, they are much easier to keep track of digitally than the old school way of hoarding them in your mancave or she shed.

LOYALTY & REWARDS PROGRAMS

Restaurants like Komodo in Miami are also starting to use NFTs for luxury food and exclusive experiences to be accessed via Web3. For example, our NFT expert, Brett Malinowski, bought an exclusive NFT that is available to only 300 people worldwide. The owner of each NFT earns the right to order a fun and exclusive dessert dining experience. While a $300 NFT and $60 dessert may seem pricey, since Malinowski owns the NFT pass, he can sell it to get his investment back (and possibly gain money doing so if the value increases).

Brett also mentioned Starbucks’ new rewards program powered by Web3, Starbucks Odyssey, that will “offer rewards members and employees the opportunity to earn and purchase digital collectible assets that will unlock access to new benefits and immersive coffee experiences.” Loyalty and rewards programs everywhere will be undergoing this type of huge digital transformation in the near future.

EDUCATION

Training and education are now being powered by NFTs. For instance, a training participants who owns an NFT may get additional access to a Discord with instructors, as well as additional materials beyond the standard coursework. When they complete the training, they can sell that NFT on the marketplace for the next person who wants to learn. This could disrupt the ongoing training and education sector, making it more accessible and affordable for people of all backgrounds to garner an education in their interest of choice.

LEGAL LEARNINGS

OK. So how does all this apply to the law?

SECURITIES LAWS

Securities Laws, enacted by The Securities Act of 1933, prohibit fraudulent sales and transactions in the capital market. However, regulators are having trouble updating and establishing what constitutes breaking the law in the virtual space. What marketers can do to protect themselves now is be sure they read the terms and conditions closely and use resources like CoinDesk or the Digital Chamber of Commerce to keep up to date with new and upcoming laws and/or double check their legal developments.

THE DEVIL’S IN THE DETAILS

Kim Prior suggests all investors seek legal council, use licensing agreements and comply with privacy laws to protect themselves from lawsuits. You can expose yourself to risk if you have not evaluated the legal ramifications. Just offering NFTs for exclusive access to an experience seems okay, but what can get tricky is the concept of royalties or transactions-based compensation in the secondary market.

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

According to Brett Malinowski, when it comes to protection from the law, “it’s all about the language.” He says, ironically, oftentimes the investors targeted are the ones trying to do it right. Prior states that lawyers now need to figure out the right model that will keep business owners in the clear, because large crypto clients want guidelines and regulations. As murky as Web3’s waters are, Prior also expresses that inclusivity is the core principle of cryptocurrency by providing people access to money that would not have been possible before.

Still a little confused? That’s okay, it’s a lot of information all at once, and we’re exploring a subject at the leading edge of technology. For more crypto guidance, Malinowski suggests following Crypto media outlets and other experts like Zeneca, JRNY Crypto, and Ellio Trades if you’re interested in learning more.

Curious about other elements of The Metaverse and Web3? Check out our full series, Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse for tips on how to market in a whole new (virtual) world.

Web3 and Metaverse Webinar Highlights

Hi there! We are sorry you missed season 6 of our Masterclass series, Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse. We recorded every session and you can watch all 6 hours from the entire season if you like! But, don’t worry. We’ve created a summary with key takeaways, action items and expert advice — all you have to do is answer a couple questions for us. See you next time!

How Brands Are Rewriting the Rules of Marketing in the Metaverse

Virtual reality has become the new reality for brands and business owners. It’s time to fully immerse ourselves in the Metaverse and Web3, because it’s taking off in the marketing world. According to the first of our four-part webinar series, “Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse,” here’s what you need to know when it comes to brand representation in the virtual space, straight from our guest experts’ mouths.

WHAT’S WEB3? WHERE’S THE METAVERSE?

Web3: The 3.0 or third version of what the internet is or what it may become. Web1 was the build out of websites, Web2 is defined as the rise of social media, and Web3 will be more about commerce among the people, and the ownership of your own information and data.

The Metaverse: There is only one Metaverse — just like there is only one Internet — but it does not yet exist. Immersive virtual spaces/worlds and experiences that are facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality do exist. One day, all of these worlds will be interconnected, as is the internet, at which point the Metaverse will be official.

IDENTIFY BRAND GOALS

Start by aligning with your brand’s goals and KPIs. What is it that your company is trying to accomplish? Where is your audience? Are they even in the Metaverse? If so, our experts agree that there are two key ways brands can market and establish their brand in the metaverse: either by having a product to sell, or an experience where people can have a positive brand interaction.

Miller Lite Metaverse Super Bowl ad

“What you’re finding brands do successfully, is this notion of creating a space where people can connect with one another that are either interesting, casual gaming, or social, or the like,” industry expert and Managing Director of Cuttlefish, Inc., Jay Miolla says. The Venture City partner and investor, Franchesca “Cesi” De Quesada Covey, echoes this sentiment, explaining that where Web3 differs from Web1 and Web2 are with longstanding relationships and engagements with a brand’s customers by creating exciting, fun, immersive experiences that connects people intimately with a brand. She emphasizes that it’s not just about amazing experiences, it’s also about “giving audiences something to take home with them after they leave.”

For example, Bacardi showed high utility by featuring musical artists in their Metaverse, putting their songs into NFTs, and giving away parts of the songs as NFTs to brand-loyal customers. This allowed customers to have an unforgettable experience, but also a way to take the brand home with them.

PLAY… BUT EXERCISE PRUDENCE

Miolla of Cuttlefish, Inc., suggests the first thing to do in the Metaverse is to let your curiosity run wild. Familiarize yourself with as many new virtual spaces as possible. Set up a crypto wallet, take notes, grab usernames, stockpile assets, research your competitors and see what they’re doing. Whether you’re exploring gaming or social interactions, take note of the experiences you find the most interesting and apply it to your future VR business endeavors.

Have fun, but don’t blow a lot of money up front before you’ve done some testing and learning, Starmark’s Chief Digital Officer, Brett Circe cautions. He recommends starting small by using some pre-existing assets to see what works and what doesn’t before investing too much in one direction. For example, does your company have any existing 3D assets like 360° photos or videos they may have used for other purposes? If so, test and learn with them in the Metaverse before emptying your wallet.

Interested in learning more about Web3 and The Metaverse? Check out our full series on Ways to Prepare Your Business for Web3 and the Metaverse for tips on how to conquer the world’s next big digital transformation.

« 1 2 3 4 5 6 … 70 »