BETC Paris, Havas Play and Unit9 are using the Rugby World Cup to showcase what the metaverse can do, opening consumers up to the role the platform can play in the game both now and in the future. We heard from Jeremy Treccani and Baptiste Szuwarski, Creatives at BETC, who discussed the campaign and what they hope it accomplishes.
How did you come up with the idea for this campaign?
We wanted to show that Meta was at the center of the campaign. Thanks to its apps (such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp), it is possible to share your passion for rugby outside of the stadium and to let everybody from all corners of the world enjoy it.
We also wanted to play on one of the specificities of rugby supporters: their love for costumes, the more colorful and ludicrous the better.
We asked ourselves how we could take this tradition of costume to another level, and we ended up with costumes of French supporters in augmented reality using the native features of Instagram to bring the joy of rugby to the masses.
What do you hope the campaign will accomplish?
With this campaign, we wanted to place Meta as an extension of the upcoming World Cup, a platform that augments supporters’ experience through native features. Everybody can claim their own colors thanks to the Instagram filters – a simple tool known by all – and share their passion for their team. It’s a fun and engaging way to share the joy of rugby with the largest number of people and take the sport outside of the stadium in order to bring it into our daily lives.
“It’s a fun and engaging way to share the joy of rugby with the largest number of people and take the sport outside of the stadium in order to bring it into our daily lives.”
Do you think technology and spaces like the metaverse will grow in importance for major events like the Rugby World Cup?
Augmented reality enhances the real world. It’s easy to imagine all the possibilities that can take place during major sporting events. The metaverse also probably has a bright future in the sports world, even if we are still in the inception phase at this point. The metaverse will enable all of us to share a common virtual space, wherever you are located in the world. This follows the values of sports and our mission of being inclusive. We can easily imagine that the partnership between sports and the metaverse is destined to grow in the coming years.