The WPP and Epic Games Partnership: What it Means for the Metaverse.
A British PR, advertising, communication, and technology company WPP has announced a partnership with Epic Games “to accelerate innovation for clients in the metaverse.” This new partnership eyes to propagate and educate more and more new brands and creators about the potential opportunities up for grabs in the metaverse.
But what exactly this partnership means for the metaverse? And how it will achieve its goals?
Epic Games is no less than a beacon when it comes to taking lead in building the metaverse. It is among the pioneers when it comes to the application of the concept of the metaverse. It started off by incorporating the idea of the metaverse inside its video games.
Now, it has gradually and strategically evolved its approach towards the metaverse by focusing on Unreal Engine and its virtual creation tools. Epic’s Unreal Engine is popular for its game developing tools, however, its utilization has now expanded and is used for various tasks in the professional world like creating prototypes of automobiles, designing clothes, and more.
Despite Unreal Engine’s popularity and expanding usage, having its knowledge is pretty rare, especially among those professionals who are not associated with the video games industry.
Here, the WPP and EPIC Games partnership comes in where tailored training programs are designed to educate more and more professionals, creatives, and executives will benefit from.
The training will teach and upskill thousands of WPP creative and technologists on how to navigate and use Epic’s Unreal Engine to create real-time 3D creation and virtual production.
The training is tailored according to the needs of three broad categories with three different metaverse curriculum tracks: executives, creative practitioners, and media experts and strategists.
This new collaboration means that we will get to see more and more exciting news brands jumping into video games via custom experiences. Existing and new brands will get to know how to use various platforms like Fortnite, and UE, as well as 3D marketplaces like ArtStation, and Sketchfab.
Moreover, WPP will also do a collaboration with Epic’s kid tech company SuperAwesome to help WPP understand online child safety and privacy. Epic Games’ Mathew Henick said,
“The collaboration between Epic, WPP, its clients, and the creator community will accelerate the building of diverse social entertainment experiences that players across the world will love.”
Although there is a lot of hype and buzz surrounding metaverse, Web 3.0, and the future of the internet, there is a lot less going on in terms of concrete steps. This new partnership is a much-needed one in terms of awareness and knowledge dissemination. Epic has had done similar partnership with another agency, Collective, and the United Kingdom’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, back in March.
The workshop was a massive success as it was on Unreal Engine and its usage in the metaverse. This showed how much more and more professionals, brands, and marketers are interested to know about the metaverse and skills provided by UE.
The future of the metaverse is slowly but surely building, and this new partnership is a rare solid step that has the elements of awareness, education, and hands-on skillset for building and utilizing the metaverse.
