Samsung held a glittery launch event for its new flagship Galaxy S22 phone with something new: A preorder button to let attendees buy it in real life. In terms of attendees it was a hit, with more than 100,000.
In terms of buying a phone, not so much.
The event, held at Samsung 837X, the virtual pop-up space the tech giant built in Decentraland last month as an experiential marketing and product launch venue for its post-Consumer Electronics Show reveals, fell short as tech glitches left would-be buyers and others frustrated.
Read more: Samsung Welcomes Users to Its Metaverse at CES 2022
From a corporate perspective, two of the biggest use cases for the metaverse are brand-building and virtual retail points-of-sale.
See: Experiential Marketing Meets Social Commerce in the Metaverse
Samsung has been ahead of the curve, so while it’s getting the branding that comes with being one of the early brands to embrace the metaverse with more than non-fungible token (NFT) drops, it also gets to iron out the kinks of a new technology.
By taking preorders for the smartphone, Samsung was testing out one of the more interesting potential uses of the metaverse. A fair number of companies are giving away and selling things like fashion accessory NFTs that can be used to customize metaverse avatars, but there’s no reason a 3-D virtual reality (VR) store can’t sell physical goods just like a website.
Read also: What’s a Metaverse, and Why is One Having a Fashion Show?
In trademark filing this week, McDonald’s revealed that it is looking in that direction, intellectual property lawyer Josh Gerben noted on Twitter Thursday (Feb. 10). Along with registering its golden arches, the fast food giant referred to “operating a virtual restaurant featuring actual and virtual goods” and “operating a virtual restaurant online featuring home delivery.”
So not only could you conceivably get a Big Mac without leaving the house, you could also be able to get one without taking off your VR goggles.
A Good First Try
The attendee numbers at the event speak to the brand-building potential of a rich metaverse presence and events. Particularly when it’s for a tech product — a high-end mobile phone — that would naturally appeal to metaverse early adopters.
And it got all those people in front of a live product reveal, Galaxy Unpacked, at Samsung 837X’s Connectivity Theater. It was simultaneously broadcast online, as well as on TikTok, Twitch and Reddit.
However, the pre-purchasing and several NFT-based games had glitches — possibly because of the high attendee numbers — according to a number of Twitter complaints.
Mind you, that’s not to say that the system didn’t work in many cases, but reports say it wasn’t smooth, either.
A scavenger hunt linked to a Samsung initiative to plant 1 million trees in the Samsung 837X metaverse building that required players search our 10 recycling-themed badges that could be turned in for a limited-edition Valentine’s Day NFT drop also reportedly had some turn-in problems.
However, the Samsung event made clear something that has been seen in early concert events held in a variety of metaverses, including Decentraland and the game/incipient metaverse Fortnite, where Travis Scott raked in $20 million from a virtual concert that attracted 12 million fans — including more than $1 million in merchandise sales.
People are as willing to buy on impulse when excited by content in the virtual realm as they are in real life.
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