Joytopia

Background

With physical world brand contacts proving tricky in 2021 and modern target audiences demanding individualized experiences in the digital space, BMW unveiled its own unique virtual world, Joytopia, in September 2021. Coldplay gave a virtual concert in the platform. Fans could invent an avatar for themselves to attend and dance to the music, watching the band from every angle.

Idea

Due to the pandemic, BMW moved all its planned activities at CES 2022 to a fully-digital programme, opening up Joytopia to visitors from all over the world to experience virtually a sequence of important events, experiences and interactions.

‘Dimensions of Real’ was a gamified platform that could be accessed from any device without special equipment or downloads and was designed as a world where BMW could think out loud about the future.

Moderated by Hans Zimmer, Academy Award winner and composer, visitors could explore the completely redesigned worlds of Confidence, Calm and Joy in various dimensions and digital landscapes.

Results

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Our Thoughts

I think this campaign would make more sense if you’d experienced it between January 5th and 7th. I didn’t. And to be honest, I found much of the press release incomprehensible. I do ‘get’ that the first iteration of Joytopia involved a fox guiding you through rather dreamy surreal worlds and I suspect the CES version, narrated by Hans Zimmer is much the same.

But beyond that I’m at a loss. And that’s precisely why this work is interesting. Even those actively engaged in building the metaverse seem to find it hard to describe what they’ve done and what it’s really like for participants. If you’ve built a world, it’s hard to capture it in a snapshot. Trying to explain the internet before anyone was actually using it must have been like this back in the early 1990s.