Christy McFerren, President at Catalyst; and Laurel Zacher, Vice President, Marketing and Talent Development at Security Properties; explored the Metaverse — what it is, how marketers can step into it, and how it might even drive leases while having fun in the session “Metaverse Marketing Mania — Driving Leasing with Crypto, NFTs, Streaming, and More.”
“What it comes down to right now is all of these words that we don’t all understand like virtual reality, augmented reality, gaming and what they do for social media,” McFerren said. “It’s almost like the Internet was when that was first starting more than 20 years ago.”
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and cryptocurrencies (such as bitcoin and Ethereum) are a big part of the metaverse. Apartment companies are trying to introduce the concept of all of the above and get their residents interested.
McFerren said that the 18-to-34 age group is most interested today, and the male-female split is 50-50. She said her community (student housing) has had campaigns where residents were offered the chance to win $1,000 in bitcoin or have their design team work with residents to create their own NFTs if they renewed. In other cases, discounts or concessions were offered in some way. She said it drove more than 1,000 renewals.
Said Zacher, “You see all of these companies that are using it or talking about it in some way like Nike, Disney, Coke, Verizon, Hyundai and now even Wendy’s has a restaurant in the metaverse so as an apartment company, you have to think, ‘I need to find out how to use it in my business.’ ”
Replays are $49 each or $399 for all of them.
They are complimentary for AIM attendees for the thirty days following AIM.
Click here for the slides.