It’s our job at Navigate to advise clients on any and every aspect of their business, including the latest trends. As a part of this, we continuously strive to be at the forefront of new technologies. The Metaverse is not only coming; it’s here and it’s growing. Rapidly.

In February, a New York Times article titled “How Facebook is Morphing Into Meta” highlighted that 24% of the open jobs at Meta were for roles in augmented or virtual reality. According to Statista, the global Metaverse space was valued last year at $38.85 billion and will rise to $678.8 billion by 2030.

At Navigate, the metaverse has been a primary source of conversation for much of the past year, so our holiday gift at the end of 2021 was an Oculus for all employees. (I should use this moment of shameless self-promotion to note we have a rare job opening. If you know anyone who also wants awesome holiday gifts, let us know.) Since then, we have attended NBA games in Horizon Events, played rounds of golf together from four different real-world locations, and tried to set personal records at Beat Saber. We have also held our own company happy hour in the Metaverse, so the next logical step was a client meeting.

Enter Marquee 360 and the Chicago Cubs. We already planned to have a conversation with them about the Metaverse, and Web3 more broadly, so why not have that conversation IN the metaverse?

Cale Vennum, Senior Vice President at Marquee 360 and the Chicago Cubs, joined us in our Horizon Workrooms space recently. After some initial shenanigans (all on our part) that feel inevitable in something new and different and fun, we had a great discussion.

This included:

  • How Marquee 360 and the Cubs are approaching Web3 and the metaverse from a fan experience perspective
  • The need to divvy up Web3 from a partnership perspective into its own sub-categories
  • How to balance the race for impressions among the brands investing in partnerships (e.g., crypto) with the desire by the Cubs for more meaningful integration
  • Our mutual desire is to make sure we’re NOT skeptics laughing on the sidelines, but we also know that the video of our meeting (and this blog post itself) will likely seem hilariously outdated in the not-so-distant future

As we wrapped, we agreed that this Metaverse meeting COULD have been a Zoom call; However, that’s part of the challenge for the people working within the Metaverse, and part of the challenge for us as we contemplate the research we need to conduct, the data we need to gather, and the experiences we need to embrace to best advise our clients on this evolving space.

Maybe the skeptics will be right, and this will all amount to nothing. Maybe it won’t. Either way, Navigate will be along for the ride.

The Navigate Team with Cale Vennum (of Marquee 360 and the Chicago Cubs) in our Metaverse Office
The Navigate Team with Cale Vennum in our Metaverse office.