Fundamentally for fashion, Meta and TikTok are competing for the attention span of younger users, while they also compete for fashion as advertisers. Already, TikTokers have joined fashion guest lists along with now-traditional bloggers and Instagram-first influencers. Meta’s one advantage — it hopes — is its aggressive push toward shopping; in recent years, it has rapidly rolled out technology that helps people buy what they see on Instagram especially, including in-app checkout, computer vision to find shoppable versions of goods seen on images and live video shopping. It’s also increasing the integration between Facebook and Whatsapp to enable brands to create storefronts, called Shops, and upload inventory and communicate with customers.
“Our strategy here since introducing Shops a year and a half ago has been to make it as easy as possible for people to make a purchase after discovering a new brand or product without having to switch over to a browser or re-enter their payment info,” Zuckerberg said.
Part of the plan to combat a loss of attention is a major pivot to a metaverse platform, an area that is also crowded and will take time to catch on. The metaverse is widely regarded as the next stage of the web, and expected to be as influential as websites and social media for fashion, especially because of the opportunity to sell digital items for avatars. Already, leading brands such as Gucci and Ralph Lauren are signing on to metaverse experiences on platforms such as Roblox, Zepeto and Decentraland, and Morgan Stanley predicts social gaming could add up to $20 billion to luxury’s total addressable market.
Virtual worlds and virtual commerce also mean the opportunity for virtual ads, informed by behavioural data that far surpasses what Instagram or Facebook could measure via tapping and scrolling. In its pivot to the metaverse, Meta is heavily investing in augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the necessary talent to build hardware and software to do this, a cost further eating into profits.
Meta’s vision is a virtual world in which realistic-looking avatars, wearing digital clothing that people bought via one of its properties, congregate to work and play. It hopes that all of its properties are integrated, and that people jump between its virtual worlds and augmented worlds using a range of its hardware, including AR glasses and high-end headsets. But “this fully realised vision is still a ways off,” Zuckerberg admitted, and there are already a range of players who have a head start in building immersive virtual worlds for commerce, including Roblox, Decentraland and The Sandbox.
