What do alcohol ads look like in the metaverse?

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-11-05 03:00

New Zealand

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Alcohol companies are developing ways to market their products in the metaverse, according to NZ researchers. The team developed an avatar to explore 20 metaverses and identified two metaverses with instances of marketing from alcohol companies; Decentraland and Sandbox.  They say these marketing experiences contained new ways of selling alcohol, including selling alcohol inside the virtual world via links and QR codes, offering virtual drinks and drink tastings and buying alcohol as non-fungible tokens that could be exchanged for real alcohol in the real world. The researchers say there's a lot we don't know about how metaverse users are engaging with these marketing experiences, and this is worthy of more investigation.