How To Launch Your Cannabis Brand Into The Metaverse with Wes McQuillen

{}Introduction

Host: ...an award-winning senior marketing executive who focuses on alternative strategies for the hard-to-advertise, and helps companies in challenging industries navigate complicated advertising and marketing compliance issues, to achieve their goals, stand out in a crowded field, and overcome stigma. You just won multiple ADDY Awards, and, most recently, was awarded the 2022 Reno Tech Advocate of the Year for Creative Services. Welcome to the show, Wes.

Wesley McQuillen: Hello.

Host: All right, so we are here in the metaverse, or a metaverse, talking about the metaverse — let's start off with you giving a little breakdown of how you see people using the metaverse today.

What Is the Metaverse, Really?

Wesley McQuillen: There's a huge number of ways people are using it now, primarily in terms of just pure user base, gaming is the biggest segment, but the popularity of doing things like virtual events really picked up in 2020, while we were all shut down, and that has had some staying power even as things have kind of returned to normal. People who made the investments in metaverse spaces, and hardware and software, that kind of thing, saw that it added an additional dimension to what they were doing, or professionally, an additional revenue stream — they've just kept it on. A prime example would be some of these conferences, when they had a virtual version even though they've gone back to meeting in person, they're still offering virtual tickets for people who are unable to attend in person, because they already made the investment, so they're just gonna keep it going as an option. So there's a lot of use cases right now, and, if we take a step back, as I mentioned earlier, "metaverse" is a term people use to mean different things, and some would argue the concept of the metaverse has been around for a long time, even going back to something as far back as Second Life.

Host: So when you talk to someone entering into this space, how do you explain how to navigate and describe different parts of it?

Wesley McQuillen: I think the easiest way to think of it — a lot of people think of it as these big centralized walled gardens, which is how a lot of it operates right now, but the more general idea of what it is, it's just the internet with a spatial dimension. So when you see think pieces saying it's bad or whatever, that's mostly based on people's kind of dystopian takes on them being centralized and heavily content-moderated, that kind of thing, but that's not really the real spirit of what the metaverse is — the real metaverse is essentially as free as the internet, it's just the internet with a spatial dimension.

Successful Brand Activations So Far

Host: Okay, that makes sense. And what do you see, if you were to list out some of the more successful experiences or brands, and the way people are activating in the metaverse, who would be at the top of that list for you?

Wesley McQuillen: Man, that's a good question. The ones I see, if we're not going to talk specifically about individual games — because, you know, a big chunk of it is gaming, so that's gonna be Fortnite, Roblox, stuff like that — if we're talking about business applications, brands, things like that, a lot of them are doing a really great job, and they're building on top of existing platforms — there's a lot of conferences and companies, one example would be eXp Realty, that does everything in Virbela, which is a company affiliated with the platform we're in right now — they do everything virtually, all their offices, all their conferences, everything. And then, as far as brand activations, I've really seen some interesting things that bridge the gap between lifestyle experience and gaming, by companies like Louis Vuitton, Nike just announced the Swoosh product and experience, other ones would be some really successful content creators and stand-up comedians who do performances in AltspaceVR and VRChat. It's really kind of all over the place — what's notable is who's not doing a great job, which, unfortunately, is the entity investing the most in it right now, which is Horizon — I've been following them closely for a while, expecting a lot, and have attended a lot of their activations, and, for the most part, those have not been quite so successful, and I think the takeaway is that just pure capital, pure piles of money, do not necessarily equate to doing a great job in the metaverse. In fact, a lot of the most fun things I've been to have just been completely grassroots events, that cohorts of people with similar interests put on in Decentraland, Voxels, and stuff like that — honestly, some of the best stuff is grassroots, and that's why I feel like people really should not feel limited by a budget, or those kinds of constraints, it really is blue ocean out here.

Cannabis in the Metaverse: What's Been Tried

Host: Well, let's tie that in a little bit to the industry we work in at MediaJel, which is specifically the cannabis industry, another industry that's nascent in many ways, evolving itself as it grows, and, you know, didn't exist, at least in the legal format, not that long ago — what have you seen people doing to date, from a cannabis perspective, inside the metaverse, any notable successes you've seen today?

Wesley McQuillen: Some of the things I've seen — I have seen some cannabis brands do sponsorship of some pre-existing things, like music festivals — just this past weekend, there wasn't a cannabis sponsor that I know of, but just to give an example of what I mean by metaverse music festivals, there was one, I think it was Decentraland, this weekend, that Björk was the headliner, it was huge, four days straight. And, just as a note for people who aren't familiar with Decentraland, it's called that because it's decentralized, it isn't owned by any one entity necessarily, it's run in aggregate, and people own their plots of land, they own their avatars, they own their collectibles, so the clothes they wear and the little things they can do to their avatars, those are all assets that are NFTs — so it really is a metaverse where people own the things they have on their person, that they use, and that they access. So that's the whole concept of a decentralized metaverse, it's really working there, and you're starting to see so many other entities get involved. Anyway, that's just an example of a music festival — I can't name one specifically where I remember seeing a cannabis brand, but I know it's been done. Other things — I've seen cannabis brands design and launch dispensaries in the metaverse, and they've gotten attention because they're doing it as a "first," and it got them a bunch of earned media, because it was novel — but in terms of did it work well, I mean, not if you're measuring success in terms of cannabis sales happening in-world, because that's not really how it went, it didn't actually work that way, and there's a lot of reasons for that, we could get into what works and doesn't a little later. And then, NFT collectibles that are wearables — on some of these platforms you get something like a 3D leaf that floats over your head, or a jacket or blazer with a logo on it, sometimes a leaf as a hat, or wings that are green — I've seen a few brands do those as NFT drops, and either give them away to people for free, which is the more successful way of doing that, because you're doing it for brand awareness, so honestly a giveaway wearable, for free, is going to be the best way to do that. I've also seen them for sale, people buying them, and success with that has been far more limited, because, again, we're so early with all this, just engagement and participation is a win, so in cases like that, especially with NFT wearables, I think the move is to give them away.

Host: And then, just to back up a little for people — I think there's a different level of understanding, NFT can mean different things in different contexts, but going back to what you were talking about earlier, when you talk about something like Roblox or Fortnite as pretty successful metaverse experiences that people use a lot, and buy and sell content — you can't today take something you built or bought in Roblox and take it over into Fortnite, and the concept here, the metaverse, and using NFTs, as a portable object that you own and can take into these different experiences, is I think a really important aspect for people to understand.

NFTs as a Portable Ownership Protocol

Wesley McQuillen: Yeah, because it's something I think people can understand the value of — I know there's been a bunch of friends, particularly on the art side of the NFT world, and we've seen that go up and down, and I think many people just look at that and say, "well, this is just a fad," but the underlying construct has a lot more value.

Host: Right.

Wesley McQuillen: So it's a protocol, and that's kind of what I want to help people understand — in the '90s, with email, nobody owns email, email is a protocol, and when we had things like phishing scam emails, or getting inundated with spam, we didn't throw email away, we just acknowledged it's a protocol, bad actors and good actors are going to use it to meet their aims. So when there are things that are annoying, like spam, or phishing emails, princes asking you to hold money for them, we just created spam filters, and we also became savvy to what's likely a scam — the same thing will happen with NFTs, as a protocol, we'll get to the point where no one even says "NFT" anymore, it'll kind of be like MP3, nobody talks about MP3s anymore, it's just music — it'll be the same with digital assets and digital collectibles, we won't even call them NFTs anymore. So it's a protocol, nobody owns it, it's a way of owning an asset digitally that's intangible, but this is a way of making it tangible, a way of owning it such that you can take it with you to different places. That's the ideal, we don't have full interoperability at the moment, that's what devs are working towards, but right now a lot of platforms have different protocols — just the way you code an object will work on some platforms and not others, and that's kind of a technical issue, something they're working on, but that's the North Star, the waypoint we're all headed towards and building towards. I mean, this is all very early, it's the Wild West, things aren't going to be perfect yet, but what's important is that we all have a shared vision, and that all these platforms are kind of working towards some of the same shared values, and I do see that the majority of them right now are great.

How Much Should a Cannabis Brand Invest Right Now?

Host: So now that we've got a baseline of what the metaverse is, some examples of what people have tried to do successfully — let's say I'm a cannabis brand or a retailer, and I come to you and say, "hey, I don't know anything about the metaverse, I know it's a big open space though, and that creates opportunity for a brand," especially in the cannabis space, where there aren't really large, national, established brands — there are some brands getting close to that, I would say, but even today, if you did a Family Feud-style poll across the country and asked people to name cannabis brands, you wouldn't get a very consistent data set. So we know there's opportunity for cannabis companies to build strong brands, we also know the metaverse is a place that's cluttered and uncluttered at the same time, I guess — but right out of the gate, if I came to you as a cannabis brand or retailer and said, "what should I do, what should I not do, how should I approach this," what would your answer be?

Wesley McQuillen: My answer for now — and these things change very rapidly, the scene looks different now than it did two months ago, six months ago, 12 months ago — is that it would be a missed opportunity to do nothing, but it also might be foolish, especially if I'm talking to a CEO, especially considering economic forecasts and belt-tightening and that kind of thing, to devote a huge percentage of a marketing budget towards this. So I'd say it's kind of somewhere in the middle right now — there's still almost no one doing anything, so doing anything, you're going to have some degree of a first-mover advantage, and, as we all know, with every new social media platform — and you can view this as a type of social media, in a way — a lot of who ends up having the biggest audiences has to do with who's earliest, and that's going to be true here as well. So what I don't want is for people to totally sleep on it and do nothing. There's also going to be a significant learning curve, we're all figuring this out as we go, and if you're out there trying things, testing things, figuring out what works and what doesn't — maybe you throw an event, attendance is low, figure that out now, because once it becomes a bigger thing, you'll have a head start on everyone else not doing anything yet, you'll have already done some testing and experimenting, and you'll know the pitfalls, the problems you ran into, and those are going to be more costly later on, whereas making those mistakes now isn't really going to cost you much of anything. So I recommend really letting your creatives and marketing department brainstorm, have a lot of ideas around this, bring in Web3 consultants, just be really open-minded, because we're inventing this, we're creating this, we don't even have established standards yet, this is definitely the time. So I would say, if in a typical retail budget you've got about five to eight percent allocated for marketing, I would say, of that marketing budget, maybe allocating five to ten percent — more conservative, on the five percent side — to some brand building, some activations, trying out some sponsorship, just getting your feet wet, is a really prudent and smart thing to do right now.

Host: Yeah, that's great advice, following that through, finding someone with expertise is important — let's say most people still don't have wallets, haven't gone to Decentraland or the Sandbox, or some of these experiences — I'm talking about a marketing person, or business owner, hiring a consultant or expert that can be helpful, but also, sometimes, it's not, if you don't find the right person. What advice would you give to someone who's been in retail for a while and wants to hire a consultant to help with merchandising — that's an easier thing to understand, there's a larger body of work, one may have some logical things to ask — but if someone doesn't even know what to ask when talking to consultants, and everyone at this point is kind of self-certifying, because there are no governing bodies, how would you guide someone in collecting the right kind of expertise, so they go the right direction and don't just lose money?

Vetting a Web3 Consultant

Wesley McQuillen: That is a fantastic question, really hard to discern right now, especially if you just get on LinkedIn and search "Web3 consultant," the people who come up are all over the place in terms of how much actual expertise they have. What I would say is, myself and my peers, people who've been deeply immersed in this for years already, what I notice about the people in this cohort who I'd say could actually be good consultants, is they won't call themselves "Web3 experts," because they know there are no experts. If you run into someone whose messaging is "I'm the expert, I guarantee results," it's almost a vibes thing, because overconfidence is probably the biggest tip-off, and making any kind of promises — the people I respect most in this space, who I would call experts, are very humble, completely transparent about the fact that all of this is still being created, still being developed, still being tested — they won't even necessarily call it "testing," they'll call it "experimenting," because even the framework of testing, in an AB testing sense, is almost too much "best practices" compared to what we're actually doing, which is, we don't even have best practices yet, we're building. So, if there were accolades to look for — here's another thing, it's on chain, right, so if somebody has a wallet they can share with you, that you can look back and see activity into early 2021, 2020, 2019, that'll give you a good sense that they're not lying about being active for all this time, because it's all on chain.

Host: Sure.

Wesley McQuillen: I almost have more red flags than good advice, they're easier to look for, sometimes. What I'd say is a huge following on social media does not necessarily designate anything — a lot of those people, not everybody, some of the people I respect most have very large followings on Twitter, but there are some people with very large followings who don't have any real business acumen, really basic stuff like how different departments interact, or how to read a P&L sheet, and stuff like that — some of them just happened to be in the right place at the right time, made a couple flips, made a bunch of money in the second quarter of 2021, said a few of the right things, went viral, and ended up with a hundred thousand followers, and now they're considered these expert tastemakers, and some of them are highly intelligent and some of them are not, so this is why it's a good question, it really is hard to discern. So, probably, other things — references, screenshots of actual results, not just a huge following, but someone who can share screenshots of, "I helped this project sell out in this amount of time," or "I helped this project grow their number of Discord users by this percent," or grow followers on Twitter by a certain percentage — just the way you'd vet any marketing consultant, you probably want to use some of those benchmarks, and definitely word of mouth from other people you trust — looking for skepticism over just claims, humility, provable bodies of work, that kind of thing.

Host: Sorry to cut you off — yeah, good, it's really similar to how you can go on LinkedIn and see thousands upon thousands of people who refer to themselves as cannabis digital marketers.

Wesley McQuillen: Yeah, and there's how you discern between them, because lots of people claim it, and there's a much smaller subset of people who are competent, and it's very similar.

A Test Question for Spotting Real Expertise

Host: I've got a single question that I can ask someone, on something specific, which is programmatic advertising, which is one of the things we do — it's simple on the face, because you're serving videos and banner ads on phones and computers, but it's a very complicated system under the hood, and I've got one question I use to ask someone, which is to ask them to explain header bidding — which I'm not going to get into right now, because it's complicated, header bidding is a way you can bid on impressions, and it can be highly effective — but if I'm trying to discern if someone understands programmatic advertising well, that's a question they either know the answer to or don't, and it doesn't necessarily mean the individual doesn't know a lot about it, but it definitely demonstrates that person is likely an expert if they can answer it. Do you have any questions like that for the metaverse, that someone could ask?

Wesley McQuillen: I'll let you think about that — what I would ask would be, what are your favorite platforms and why, and which demographic cohorts are best suited to each one? I think someone being able to demonstrate they know several of them, which ones involve a wallet and which don't, which are essentially MMORPGs, and which demographic cohorts are best suited to which ones, which tend to be more events-based, which more gaming-based, which more art-based, because they all kind of have their own verticals — because you can do anything anywhere, but certain ones are more suited, like the ones better for events have more robust audio tools, instead of just the microphone embedded in your device picking up whatever's playing on a speaker in your room, versus having direct input for an actual DJ — these are the kinds of things that demonstrate someone has actually spent time in a bunch of these platforms, understands how they work, which are user-friendly, which are accessible across multiple devices — like the one we're in right now, I love the accessibility, because you just use arrow keys to get around, anyone who's done anything in any kind of navigation can figure that out, all you do is tap a URL to open it on a phone or laptop, and you can also do it and hear the best experiences in here, it's not headset-only, the UX is pretty simple — but this is appropriate for some things and not everything, there's a user limit of 15 in this room, so if I wanted to do a high-attendance event, this is not the place. So being able to answer that question would probably give you a sense of how experienced someone really is.

Touring Frame VR

Host: Okay, that sounds helpful. Now I see we're — I think it looks like Mount Fuji over there, and we've got some nice cannabis clones here — where are we exactly? We haven't even talked about the platform we're on, or how we are talking, in our little avatars here, with our webcams at the same time — maybe you can tell everyone where we are and what it is.

Wesley McQuillen: This platform we're on is Frame VR, the URL for it is framevr.io — it's technically a beta project, a beta product, they've been developing this for at least two years, I've been jumping in and participating as a user who's done quite a bit in here — in the end of 2020, December 2020, I did a 30-day sprint where I came in and built a new VR environment every single day for 30 days, just to get quick at using all the tools for rapid mockups and rapid deployment. And going through that experience, I don't work for their team, but I'm connected to them on LinkedIn and Twitter, and was able to give them a bunch of feedback on what it's like as a user, not an employee, not a dev — I have no idea what they may have implemented or not, but I just wanted to get really quick at using it, and it was a great exercise for me. So that's what this is, and they have a bunch of environments built in, so we can switch between environments — right now we're in, let me go check, I think it might be called Serenity Garden.

Host: Yeah, and I just recently got acquainted with this, it is shockingly easy to use — it turned out to be a little too easy, because I got sent the link on my phone, clicked on it thinking I was just going to go to a website and read something, and then all of a sudden I was in a room talking to you, which I was actually not prepared for at the moment, but it's very easy to use.

Wesley McQuillen: Yeah, it is. So this has pre-populated multiple environments, which, for the purposes of this meeting, I customized a little — the 3D models of the cannabis plants to the sides here, I went and got those, they're royalty-free, free for commercial use, over on Sketchfab, a website anyone can sign up for to download free 3D models of things — you can also use LiDAR on your phone to do your own 3D scans, to use for yourself or upload to the rest of the community, where they can download things, I've done that and had people download things I've uploaded, it's like a community repository, and some models are paid, but I go and look for things there and download them — that bud we have back in the garden, I downloaded that right before we got started, and the rotating logo I put up as well, and that was just a very quick exercise in branding this space — you can do as much or as little as you want, you can generate an entire new environment in Blender and upload that, and have a completely custom environment, 100% branded to an event, brand, or company, generate as many objects, furniture, anything really — the thing that's so amazing about the metaverse in general, about this tool specifically, is it really is sky's the limit. There are file size limitations, to make sure things load quickly, but as long as you stay within specifications, kind of anything you can imagine you can create in here, and, when you want to build something from scratch, you just go to the empty frame, which is literally empty, nothing in it, and start adding everything from the ground up. This is one of many — this company is also affiliated with another platform called Virbela, which is very specific to business applications, primarily used as a work campus — there's a lot of very large entities, like Stanford, the Army, Microsoft, huge companies that have campuses in Virbela, where people have an avatar just like this, that sits at a desk on the floor of a virtual building, and when people want to go interact with people on their distributed remote teams, they literally walk down the virtual hallway and knock on their virtual door to go talk to them, and it really gives people a sense of place, because there's a difference, experientially, between having a Zoom call where it's Brady Bunch, nine or 15 people's faces, people don't have those non-verbal cues for knowing when to jump in and not talk over each other.

Host: What were you saying? No, I'm kidding.

Skeuomorphic Design and Why Virtual Offices Work

Wesley McQuillen: It's almost like skeuomorphic design, to have actual offices.

Host: You're gonna have to explain skeuomorphic design, most people aren't familiar with it, and Apple kind of ditched it a while ago, but don't ask me to spell it.

Wesley McQuillen: Yeah, it is hard to spell too, it's a funky word. So skeuomorphic design is when we design things that are intuitive to use, for technology we're already familiar with — so if you're in a Zoom call with 15 people and want to have an aside with just one person, to collab on something, hash something out really quickly, and come back and present it to the group, that's very hard to do with a bunch of faces in squares. But if instead you're in an office, in something like Virbela, and the meeting is happening in a conference room, you can tap the other avatar, and you and the other avatar can go into another room that has a private audio zone, or private voice area, where there's a little dotted line on the ground that means only people standing inside can hear each other, and people outside can't hear you — you literally walk into another area, have your quick one-on-one, hash something out, and walk back into the conference room to talk to everybody else and present whatever you just figured out. The fact that people are already familiar with what a conference room is, what a sidebar is, from working in a real office, is a much easier and more approachable way of doing something than looking at nine squares and trying to figure out, "well, am I going to text this person, do we both need to shut off our cameras and get on a phone call," that's clunky. So skeuomorphic design is taking what people are already familiar with, and building things in a way that's naturally intuitive to them.

Where to Start: Spaces vs. Assets vs. NFTs

Host: Okay, great, all right, so we've meandered a little bit, because it's such a broad area, let's get back to the topic — cannabis brands, how can a cannabis brand launch an experience, or get into the metaverse, what does the cost look like, where do you start? It's free, if — I know if you want to buy land in Decentraland, even though it's decentralized, it's not free — where do you start trying to make a presence?

Wesley McQuillen: Well, that really depends on strategy, it's going to be highly individualized based on the company, but I can narrow it down.

Host: Okay, let's go through a couple use cases — let's say I'm a brand in an adult-use market like California or Michigan, and I want to take advantage of the open space the metaverse represents, to get a foothold and start to look like one of the first brands there — do I go spend a bunch of money and buy a plot of land in Decentraland and open up a virtual dispensary?

Wesley McQuillen: What you just described — go and throw twenty thousand dollars down at some virtual land and build something without any activation planned around it — no, don't do that. Not to say there wouldn't be a reason, but you'd really have to make sure you understood why, before just doing it because it's cool — the only reason to do something like that just because it's cool is literally just for the earned media. Where I'd say to start is, create accounts and just start puttering around in there, become familiar with it first, because it's going to be really hard to do any kind of strategy if you're not already familiar with it. Maybe do something I've done before, a workshop where we did a scavenger hunt with about 30 people through a bunch of different metaverse platforms, giving them exposure to all of them, so they had a sense of the vibes, the usability, the controls, the platforms, who's there. So I'd say the place to start is just familiarize yourself, start there, and then things I think are the most intuitive are things that are kind of parallel to what you're already doing in your IRL marketing — if you're already a brand that leans heavily on sponsorships of lifestyle events, do the same thing in the metaverse, because a lot of times there are already audiences established there, and it's much easier to go get collab'd with an audience that already exists, than trying to take your current customer base and incentivize them to overcome whatever barriers are involved in participating — which you can do, and that's definitely a long-term strategy, finding ways to incentivize people to go participate who aren't already doing it, but that's a much higher barrier than just figuring out, "oh, here's a music festival that already happens, let me do a sponsorship." The only thing you have to be mindful of with stuff like that is whether it's age-gated, whether it's a platform that skews heavily towards young people, because some of these platforms, like VRChat, the user base skews heavily under 18, so that's not going to be good. Now, granted, the thing around compliance with all this is, there are no regulations in any state that I'm aware of that say what legally cannabis brands are allowed to do or not do in the metaverse, because this is just too far ahead of compliance, the rules don't exist yet — I'm sure they will, but they don't exist yet, and so what I advise my clients, in a case like this where there isn't anything written already, is to honor the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law, because the letter of the law on this doesn't exist, but you know what the spirit of the law is — we're not marketing to people under 21, so do your best not to do that. Something that comes up for that — let's say you did buy a plot and wanted to build a dispensary, although, again, there'd have to be a really specific use case for that, because people are irregular, and e-commerce is honestly less clunky and makes more sense than people trying to buy cannabis in the metaverse — I'd say the primary reason to do something like that would mostly be brand awareness, using it as a portal to get people to go somewhere else. But where you have to be mindful about compliance is, some platforms allow age-gating and some don't have it built in, there's no way to control who walks in and out, and so then it's that spirit-of-the-law thing again — the best effort would be putting up a sign in front of the door that says "do not enter unless you're over 21," the fact that you put that sign up shows you made an effort, and that's really all we can do, try our best to honor the spirit of the law. And then, in terms of what's visible to people under 21 on the outside of the building, any signage outside should not have calls to action to buy cannabis, because that might be seen by people under 21, that's also not a spirit-of-the-law thing. So, go in, get some exposure, do some experimenting, get familiar, then, once you have an idea of a platform that skews to an appropriate age cohort, has some really successful events already going on, already has a certain amount of foot traffic that makes sense, look and see who are the most successful events and entities and users in the space, what are the opportunities for collaboration — that's where I recommend people go, not building a dispensary in Decentraland, because, for the most part, with VR stuff, we're not at a point yet where people just close their tabs at the end of the day, put on a headset, and wander around looking for something to do — for the most part people disconnect from IRL and connect to the metaverse for something specific, a specific place and time, so you want to make sure these activations have a time and a place, and you're going to do a lot of marketing on other channels to get attention, because we're not at an "if you build it they will come" point in the metaverse yet. I've seen people spend very large amounts of money to build things, do the launch, maybe a couple hundred people show up, have a great time, and then it sits there empty afterward, because there wasn't any thought put into how to make that an active space. So, for the most part, stuff in here needs to be specific activations, around a specific date, time, and objective — how are you going to onboard people, what happens once they're there, how do you hand-hold them through the experience, and then how do you off-board them, because the likelihood of them coming back in and seeing something isn't guaranteed, so try to gather their contact information while they're in the activation, and do your follow-up on a completely different channel, SMS or email — you have to be thoughtful about the entire UX, from off-world to in-world and back off-world, and how you're going to keep people coming back, because you can't just throw spaghetti at the wall and expect it to stick, you have to be very thoughtful for it to produce any kind of ROI at all.

Host: Okay, so let me summarize a couple things — I know I'm long-winded, sorry, there's a lot to talk about — so we have spaces, like Decentraland or Roblox, which is definitely not where you want to do cannabis marketing, where you can create a presence, and you also have the ability to create objects or items via NFT, which is a protocol — those are two different strategies, and I'd sort of intuitively lean towards NFTs being more like merch, versus a space being something like a dispensary or an event. If you think about them from a marketing channel perspective, they're two very different things, and they both require different resources, right, the expertise you need to build this building we're in, and that pond, is a different set of skills than someone making avatars, or a piece of art, or an in-game tchotchke of some sort. What is the cost and effort for those two different kinds of things, and what do you think the best uses are for each? And I'll add one more question to stack in — you mentioned some spaces allow age-gating, it'd be great to know which ones those are.

Wesley McQuillen: All right, so, the first part was spaces versus assets, level of effort — where should you go check it out first? So, stuff like this, Frame, and then Virbela, which is more the business application, normally don't have anything happening unless there's a specific event or activation — this is a space other strangers aren't going to stumble into, I generated this and created the URL specifically for this, so, other than learning how to build, you're not going to gain so much out of poking around here. What I'd recommend, if you just want to poke around, is AltspaceVR, which you can do on desktop or headset, VRChat, also desktop or headset, Decentraland, Voxels — those used to be called Cryptovoxels, rebranded to just Voxels — and Meta Horizon, Horizon does have stuff going on — that's a good place to start, and the only expense is downloading the clients for desktop or laptop, and the only expense of a headset is just owning the headset, so that's not really going to cost anything, and that's very beginner level, just to go check those out. If you want price points for building or buying, things like this — this is a beta product and free at the moment, those other platforms I mentioned are all free — the only thing that costs anything is if you want a private space, or branded space, or want to create or buy assets, or buy a plot of land, so you can alter what's on it, because a lot of the space in these places you can walk around and explore with no restriction, what you can't do is change it, redesign it, alter it — only the person who owns that plot can change it. So the base level of getting acquainted shouldn't cost you anything, if you want to build a custom branded experience using a rapid development tool, using the tools that are built in, it's not going to cost anything, if you want something totally custom, you're going to have to hire somebody who does 3D design in Blender or a similar program, to design an environment for you, that you then download and upload yourself.

Host: As far as NFTs — before you go on — what does that cost? People understand broadly what it costs to get a landing page made for a campaign, or a logo, but most people have no idea what it costs to make a building like this.

Wesley McQuillen: There's definitely a huge range — if we went the absolute cheapest route possible, you could go to Sketchfab and look for something like this, and download it for free if it says free for commercial use, or, if they want you to pay for commercial use, you could do that, and find something really close to what you want. If you want something totally custom, designed from scratch, you'd pay a person to design it in 3D, and, depending on how big or complicated it is, how many polygons it has, that ranges anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a few thousand.

Host: And what's the off-the-shelf price range, taking the middle part of it?

Wesley McQuillen: If you go and download a model on Sketchfab, they tend to range in the five to fifty dollar range.

Host: So not very expensive.

Wesley McQuillen: No, not like buying a plot in Decentraland, that's a completely different ownership model.

Host: Okay, so you've given us some good examples of places to explore from an experience perspective.

Wesley McQuillen: Let me jump in — some information I think is valuable, still on that cost thing, is a lot of people I talk to, when I tell them what I do, are under the impression that things like — we haven't talked much about AR, but I'll jump in and say a little — the cost for a custom-branded Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok filter, or a custom-branded small VR environment like where we're at, or a basic NFT collectible available for your customer base to download for free — people seem to be under the impression those are massively cost-prohibitive, that you've got to have at least twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars to throw down for something like that, and that is patently not the case. You can get a custom Instagram filter that does makeup, adds a hat, has animation, whatever, around somebody on Instagram, to grow your organic reach, for as little as fifteen hundred dollars, depending on complexity, and that's going to live on your profile forever.

Understanding AR vs. VR

Host: And what does that look like for someone who hasn't seen that — I'm on Instagram, I go to my profile, what happens?

Wesley McQuillen: Normally where people encounter them is watching their friends' stories — they're tapping through, this person, that person uses one, they'll see their friend doing some quiz thing, like a floating thing over their heads, "what neighborhood should you move to," it scrolls randomly through answers, or animated ears, makeup, a fake tattoo, they'll see their friends use it and tap the filter to use it themselves — most people encounter it organically that way. But if somebody wanted to specifically go see if your company has one, they'd go to your company's account page, the front page is just the timeline, but there's other tabs that show reels and things the account's been tagged in, and one that looks like a little sparkle emoji — that's where a brand's custom filter sits — but most people don't go looking for those, they encounter them organically, which is why they're so useful for drastically growing organic reach.

Host: Okay, and those aren't that expensive, you're saying, depending on complexity.

Wesley McQuillen: No, many of those are quite affordable, and it's an evergreen marketing tool for as long as Instagram is around.

Host: Fair enough — and now we're talking about AR, augmented reality, which is different from the metaverse, right, because that's virtual reality, this is augmented reality, it is related — I've heard people argue about whether AR should be considered VR or not.

Wesley McQuillen: I guess there are arguments one way or the other, but from a business application, AR is — would you say AR is probably more commonly used and approachable than VR today, with specifically what you're talking about, like an Instagram or Snapchat filter — yes, it's already embedded in a lot of people's lives, to a much higher degree than VR.

Host: And is there some level of portability, where a brand that's developed AR assets could somehow bring them into VR experiences?

Wesley McQuillen: In most cases, no — most of those filters are built in proprietary tools, in the case of Instagram filters specifically, they're designed inside a program called Spark AR, a Meta product, and it's built to work across Meta products. There are other cases where maybe a model used in a Spark AR filter is itself an OBJ or GLB 3D model, and that model is a lot more portable than whatever is developed natively inside Spark AR.

The Vegas Golden Knights: A Model for Brand Lore

Host: That's helpful. Now, we've gone around a bunch of different topics, talked about things not to do, where to explore generally — we're kind of scratching the surface, there hasn't been a lot of major success, especially not in the cannabis space, to speak of. I know we were talking earlier, and you mentioned the Vegas Golden Knights, and how they have something that maybe would be a good model, a good combination of features — can you talk about what they've done and why that's interesting?

Wesley McQuillen: Sure, so I brought this up in an earlier conversation, because I'm not personally a sports person, I don't go to a lot of games, but I went to a workshop we put on locally, for the Reno chapter of the American Advertising Federation, where we invited the marketing department from the Vegas Golden Knights to come talk to us about how they do marketing, and I thought they were a really great example of something you could take and port over for applications for cannabis brands. What they have going for them that's so unusual is they have a very global view of the whole experience — it's going to be great for someone who's never been to a game and only goes to one, and it's also equally enjoyable for people with season tickets who go to all of them. They're designed to be appealing at all levels, and accomplish that through some things that will also work for what cannabis brands could do in the metaverse — they have a great underlying lore, they've built characters, they've built a story that underpins everything, that's the common thread through all their experiences. Their in-game experience — they're "the entertainment capital," so they feel they have to go above and beyond a normal game experience to show that off — really high-level production video, to tell character stories, how they're going to face off, what the background motivations are, beautiful sets, that kind of thing. And at the beginning of the game, that video gets shown, sets the scene for the whole thing, and it's immediately followed by a performance — an ice performance involving characters in costume, incorporated with projection mapping directly on the ice — the example they shared was, I can't remember if it was Portland or Seattle, but a team with a Kraken theme, and it showed the face-off, but also showed projection mapping of the ice crumbling away and the Kraken coming up out of the ice, fighting with live-action characters on the ice — it was really quite amazing. And then, as the game gets started, throughout the game, all their stuff is consistently branded, they've created a bunch of their own memes, referencing their lore, also referencing regular pop culture memes, so people inherently understand them — as something happens, somebody gets a goal, gets disqualified, whatever, there are names that pop up on all their screens relevant to everything happening live in the game. They've done this really great global experience, using all of the senses, all the emotional cues that connect someone to a brand, and that's something cannabis brands can do in the metaverse, and this opportunity that no one is taking advantage of right now is to really see their cannabis brand from a high level, an overarching lore, and find ways to tie that in a way you really can't do in a brick-and-mortar store or on social media — when you bring that spatial element into it, how much more dimension does that give to brand experiences that maybe translate fairly well across social media, or your in-store experience, or packaging, but you really don't get to that next level, where people have that deep emotional connection, until you add something like this kind of digital spatial element, in terms of eliciting emotions, deep loyalty — those things are all achievable by bringing it into this kind of space.

Host: Yeah, you mentioned something earlier which I find very important — you'll hear me say this anytime I end up speaking, marketing is about telling stories, and stories are how you communicate concepts to human beings, and you talked about lore, being really the canon of your story — so the Vegas Golden Knights have this canon of concepts that surround their story as a brand, and you're right, what better way to tell your story than in a three-dimensional space, where you're not limited to the confines of a screen, you have sound, video, immersion, hybrid experiences like this one, where I'm looking at something in a 3D experience but on a 2D screen.

A Guided Tour Continues

Host: I feel like I've been sitting too long, my avatar's legs are getting cramped — I don't even have legs, so that's not true. I think we're wrapping up on time here, but, speaking of stories, let's maybe show a little bit about what we can do in an environment like this — can you take us to some other, we can do a little Matrix thing, pop us around to different environments?

Wesley McQuillen: Yeah, that's one of the things — we have live reactions we can do, down in the bottom right, that brings emojis to a whole new level. There's actually a lot of tools built into this platform that, without switching to edit mode, I couldn't necessarily do live in the moment, but there are little portals I can add, glowing clouds that you jump on top of and it ports you to other places, and the models don't have to be static — these cannabis plants, and that bud behind us, are animated models too, let me see if I have one I can throw up. These butterflies over the pond are an example of an animated model, some of these you can get for free on Sketchfab, they're animated, and you sit them where you want and they'll move around within a predetermined space, like a tiger in a running cycle.

Host: Is this done with LiDAR, or how is this — is it a Matterport camera?

Wesley McQuillen: I have a feeling someone either did this with a Matterport camera, or with LiDAR, the sensor that's in most phones these days, or possibly a dedicated 3D scanning camera, but honestly the quality you can get with basic LiDAR scanning, with a free app on a phone, is actually pretty significantly good.

Host: Is it simple enough to just go into a different room, so to speak, will it take all of us to a different room?

Wesley McQuillen: Yes, if I switch this environment over, we should probably go back to the center here — I can switch us to another environment, and these models and the MediaJel logo will all end up going with us, we're all in a club, so we might end up with plants sticking out of furniture and stuff, but that's okay, let's pick a spaceship.

Host: But the bud comes with us too.

Wesley McQuillen: Well, you gotta bring that on any road trip together. So other things we can add — this is platform specific to Frame — there's all kinds of other things, we can add streaming video, a web browser, a whiteboard everyone can draw on, upload images, videos, other 3D models, PDF documents, polls, label things with text labels, do 360-degree photos, designate voice zones, so we can draw a little dot on the floor to make it so only people inside the dotted line can hear each other, there are effects that can be added, like this little sparkly thing in the corner, if you want to draw attention to something you can put one of these effects on top of it, you can add chairs for people to sit on, there are also some pre-populated games, like a basketball hoop with a basketball everyone can grab and throw to play basketball — there's a ton of things we can add to these environments, but if you want, we can jump into another one and check out one more, I think we've got a couple minutes left.

Closing Remarks

Host: All right, well, I think we're going to wrap up on time here, speaking of stories — that's a fantastic tour, what's a great place to reach out to you, and maybe we can wrap up talking about your business, who you help, and how people can get a hold of you if they want more information.

Wesley McQuillen: The best place to reach out to me is LinkedIn, under Wesley McQuillen, I'm very active there. Second best, if you want to keep track more specifically of my involvement in immersion and the NFT space, would be my Twitter, which is Wes McQ. But the majority of what we talked about today, the best place is LinkedIn. As far as what I do, I have 17 years of experience in marketing leadership roles, that's been in a lot of articles, but where I specialize now is primarily age-restricted, and otherwise highly regulated, products and services — things that tend to be hard to advertise, that tend to have some kind of stigma to overcome, the things a lot of the larger generalist marketing agencies aren't the best suited to deal with, just because of the way they've scaled, they're not able to accommodate it all that well — so when you need a unique solution to a problem, I have the bandwidth for that that a lot of generalist agencies don't have. As far as how I do this — if you're looking for programmatic advertising, that's not me, my specialty is more the organic side, and solutions look like all kinds of things, like what we talked about today — so for people who've maybe been doing a lot of generalist or traditional marketing and hit a plateau, need to break out of that, do something different, looking for alternative marketing, I'm the one to talk to. If you've got a complex marketing problem, or need to break out of the box, that can be publicity stunts for earned media, custom AR packaging, custom AR like the Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok filters we talked about, building immersive VR experiences at the entry level all the way up to fully custom, extremely large scale, any kind of NFT or Web3 project consulting — as I mentioned, I've been immersed in the space for several years, and not a whole lot of people have been involved for quite that period of time. Again, I'm not going to guarantee any kind of results, or call myself an expert, but what I do know is everything I've already done, everything that's worked, and I've also been in the space long enough to see a lot of things that haven't worked, and that's also extremely valuable — so, anything that's kind of bleeding-edge tech, to solve marketing problems that's out of the box, I'm a good person to think of for that stuff.

Host: Great, well, thank you so much for your time, and showing me around, and everyone else, to these experiences, and sharing your knowledge.

Wesley McQuillen: Thank you, it's been fun.

Host: This has been a Cannabis Marketing Live podcast, sponsored by MediaJel — if you do need programmatic advertising for regulated industries like cannabis, that is what we do, it's not what Wes does, but that is what we do. We cover marketing trends and strategies for growing your cannabis business, next podcast will be airing live Thursday, December 1st, at 11 a.m. Pacific, and we'll be discussing cannabis lounges, and, as you were saying, Wes, real-life lounges, and what's coming next. Thank you, have a good day.

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