Why iHeartMedia launching on Epic Games’ Fortnite is super interesting and innovative:
- iHeartMedia already announced that they are creating a virtual world on the Roblox platform, so this new move to Fortnite shows the company’s major investment in not just one, but multiple metaverse platforms popular with Gen Z + Gen Alpha consumers. With these initiatives, iHeart now owns virtual venues where they can routinely hold cost-effective virtual concerts with the potential to reach millions of viewers worldwide. They are expecting to host 20 events in the next year alone. That’s great for artists looking to promote new work and for iHeart’s ad sales team that now has new ad inventory to sell.
- State Farm is sponsoring the main stage of iHeartLand and has exclusive naming rights to the iHeartLand arenas across all its iterations on different metaverse platforms. This is a brilliant move that gets iHeart a partner to help underwrite development costs. And for State Farm, they get significant metaverse exposure and learnings without having to manage multiple game development projects themselves. Both businesses are taking what they already do (iHeart - reaching music fans and selling advertising, State Farm - selling insurance by advertising heavily) and smartly translating that into the metaverse.
- Not only has iHeartMedia brought on an arena sponsor, they had previously agreed to leverage their 1,500 person ad sales team to sell ads within Metaverse platforms like Roblox through a partnership with Super League Gaming, which has access to exclusive ad inventory within 150 crusted, brand-safe games. Nice work, Zach Hahn.
Brands follow audiences, and it’s exciting to see how iHeartMedia is not only bringing its own brand to young metaverse audiences, but also how it’s leveraging its sales team to bring other brands along into the space as well.
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