WPP’s Hogarth launches 700-strong metaverse army
WPP is stepping into the metaverse via content production company Hogarth with The Metaverse Foundry, a global team of 700 creatives, producers, visual artists, developers and technologists it says will design and execute brand experiences for clients in this groovy new world.
The metaverse, for those of you who haven’t been listening at the back, is defined as a “simulated digital environment that uses augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and blockchain, along with concepts from social media, to create spaces for rich user interaction mimicking the real world.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has already been revamped as Meta as Facebook tries to snaffle an internet all of its own.
WPP says its agencies are already delivering metaverse projects for clients Wendy’s, Under Armour (below), Duracell, Pfizer, Pizza Hut and Bombay Sapphire.
Hogarth global CEO Richard Glasson says: “This is a very exciting time to be in the production and content creation business. We are living through extraordinary change, and our clients have whole new worlds to navigate and radically new ways to engage with their customers.”
Newly-appointed global ECD Mehta Mehta says: “The Metaverse Foundry is a limitless place where creative, production and innovation come together to bring to life your greatest ideas. A place for future-focused brands that want to build communities, and technologies that are designed to elevate e-commerce and customer experiences.
“In a nutshell, The Metaverse Foundry is built to take ideas to the next level at scale. The only limitation is going to be your imagination. You think it, we’ll make it happen.”
WPP certainly seems to be throwing resource at what some poeple see as the successor to the internet. Hogarth has done well under CEO Glasson. It’s now a radically different creature from the print production house it once was. It seems to have become WPP’s answer to Sir Martin Sorrell’s Media.Monks, a former home of ECD Mehta.
