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The metaverse with Don McGuire, CMO, Qualcomm
by Coral Movasseli, Founder, All In Tech July 26, 2022
PARIS – I sat down with Don McGuire, Chief Marketing Officer, Qualcomm Technologies at Vivatech Paris this year to discuss all things Qualcomm, the metaverse, and diversity & inclusion. Qualcomm is an American tech giant that’s known for making chips to connect devices to the cloud. With his joyful presence, Don explained that this is Qualcomm’s first Vivatech, and they see the conference as a great way to build a European presence and they’ve been very engaged this year: we found Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, discussing ‘The Future of Automotive’ on a fireside chat, and Don adding to the discourse of ‘Marketing in the Metaverse’.
When addressing the Metaverse Don is cautious to point out that we need to first address it as a concept: ‘What is the metaverse?’ Probing further, Don details the four levels of reality for us ”There is 1. Real life, which is the physical world; 2. Augmented Reality (AR), which is adding layers of information to your real world, or the physical world; 3. Virtual Reality (VR), which is completely virtual so everything that you’re experiencing, through some sort of device is virtualized; and then there’s 4. Mixed Reality (MR), where you’ve got a little bit of virtual, a little bit of augmentation”. For Qualcomm each can deliver a unique experience, and by leveraging them all together – collectively known as Extended Reality (XR) – it can enable multiple layers of experiences.
Currently you need some good hardware to enter the metaverse – a PC, VR Headset, phone or augmented glasses – but in the future Don tells us it could be your car or other wearable technology. Irrespective of the device you use to enter, “Qualcomm is your ticket into the metaverse”. Qualcomm enables most of the world’s smartphones, PCs, automotive, and currently all the XR devices on the market are powered by their Snapdragon technology – Oculus, Vive, HoloLens, Ray Ban glasses, Facebook glasses – so you’ll be using their technology.
We delve deeper, covering ‘‘How can brands build relevance in augmented and virtual worlds?’.
Don explains that whilst “most brands know how to build their brand in real life through traditional means, when it comes to embedding them or immersing themselves or their brands into a new augmented or virtual experience, there’s a lot of brands that just don’t have the roadmap or understand what they need to do or should do, or shouldn’t do”.
The only way the metaverse is actually going to reach scale is if the technology is in place for it to be pervasive enough
Brands will need to figure out which platform they will utilize to enter the metaverse – “it won’t just be one thing, right?”. How brands engage depends on the platform. There will be the enterprise suite, where companies will enable ways to make work and productivity better, including virtual meetings and conferences; alongside the entertainment suite: delivering a film, or a game. There are monetization opportunities, which have attracted brands with compelling data points to suggest that existing revenue models and success can be replicated in the metaverse. Don tells us that between Roblox and Minecraft, there are about 400 million users worldwide on the two platforms and 75% of all gaming revenue in 2021, was generated from in-game purchases.
One way Don tells us that brands can embed themselves into the metaverse, is by “creating the opportunity for the consumer, or the individual to be the main character in whatever that story is. So if I have my ‘Digital Twin’, or the digital version of myself, and I enter into a Metaverse experience, how can I become the main character of that experience? And how can a brand create the opportunity for me to have an experience or a journey through whatever that brand story is, but embed me into it? Which I think is super cool, right?”. NFTs are a good example of how this can be done – Don shares with us how Coca-Cola created an exclusive wearable for their customer by selling the Bubble Jacket Wearable NFT. Brands are also blending the virtual with the real world, by offering their customers a digital twin of the product they purchase in real life or the reverse, where you get the physical product via a virtual purchase. Don exclaims that there is a lot of experimentation going on at the moment, and whilst it’s not easy to see whether it’s attracting the intended outcome “part of evolving with technology is experimentation. So I think you have to have a certain amount of that to see what sticks”. As well as understanding what your goals are for your business. “What are you trying to get out of it? Are you just trying to give people a really cool experience, so that people feel good about your brand and there’s no monetization involved – just brand goodness, awareness and relevance. Cool. Whatever your KPIs are, I think there’s going to be room to do everything from just pure brand building, to actually selling stuff, and performing commerce”.
One of the challenges to driving adoption on the metaverse is that you need all of the following to accelerate: the right high performance devices; high computing capabilities; strong bandwidth connectivity; and the relevant content for experiences. Don tells us “The only way the metaverse is actually going to reach scale is if the technology is in place for it to be pervasive enough, right now if you are playing immersive gaming you pretty much need a $4k PC and a very fast connection, or you may have an Oculus VR and that’s all a very small segment of the population, so if the metaverse is really going to scale and drive mass adoption, so that it makes sense for brands to engage and to meet their audiences’ needs, the technology enablement has to happen first”. For Qualcomm “the one thing that’s going to either accelerate it, or slow it down, is going to be the pervasiveness of the technology platforms that enable it”. They are looking forward to the acceleration of the technology on “how advanced our technology platforms can become, how much we can deliver higher performance compute at that low power envelope, so that you can have a really great experience for a sustainable performance”.
What will help accelerate scale is 5G connectivity, to ensure there is speed, capacity and bandwidth. Qualcomm is a global 5G leader, with more than 100 5G license agreements worldwide. They’ve pushed to accelerate the launch of 5G by two years, and now they’re looking ahead to 5G advanced in a year or two from now, which will help to unlock features in the 5G world.
According to Don we’re just in the first quartile in our metaverse journey. He points out that even Mark Zuckerberg, who has changed his company name to Meta, has said the foundational technologies are not there yet. For Don, we’ve achieved 25% of the technology we need to power the Metaverse, but have only reached 1% of the potential adoption.
Qualcomm is your ticket into the metaverse
Don is also poised to bring up safety in the metaverse. He cites that over 50% of teens across the US and Europe who have engaged in online activity have experienced cyber bullying. He wants to ensure the conversation on the metaverse touches on “what lessons can we learn from social media to make sure that the metaverse is a safe place? … In order for the metaverse to be inclusive, it has to be available for everybody. And it shouldn’t be just something that if you can afford the devices and the hardware, and the connectivity, you can engage, but if you can’t, then you can’t”.
We covered how to democratize accessibility to the metaverse and make it more inclusive and diverse. Don shares with us that he’s excited to take learnings from mobile gaming and apply it to the metaverse as it gets built. He tells us that whilst PC and console gaming is heavily male oriented, with respectively 90% and 95% male gamers, mobile gaming has a 50/50 gender split.
As an industry mobile gaming accounts for 70% of all the revenue made by publishers, game titles, and engines is in mobile. Making it more inclusive and more pervasive. Qualcomm is the sponsor of a global mobile eSports platform called Snapdragon Pro Series, intended to democratize eSports and make it more inclusive. For Don, “when you can democratize the platforms, the devices, and you can lower the barrier to entry, then more people can participate. And that’s what happened with mobile gaming”. We also agreed on how the people creating these gaming experiences need to reflect diverse faces and voices. The metaverse is “wide open for content creators to be of every shape, form, gender, colour, and cultural background”. He tells me that he recently spoke with Ann Lewnes, the CMO of Adobe, on this very topic. He relays that, for Adobe, the conversations on the metaverse centers around content creation, as their tools – the Adobe Creative Cloud and Creative Suite – are what the content creators use. So they are working on making sure that the content creation ecosystem is diverse and inclusive.
When we asked Don what the future looks like in the Metaverse – he didn’t paint a futuristic picture based on scenes from Ready Player One. Instead, he told us that he thinks “the future lies along a spectrum of reality. I don’t think it’s everyone’s just gonna walk around with glasses on in the metaverse bumping into each other, or bumping into other things all the time, I think that there’s going to be things that are just better in real life. You know, nothing replaces human relationships and personal relationships”.
