Procter & Gamble pulled out of this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the world's largest tech extravaganza, but it jumped in virtually, in a big way.
P&G hosted its own virtual show in its LifeLab, an online world it launched in 2021, that bears the hallmarks of the metaverse, a big concept for the future of the internet that tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are vying to shape.
"These environments are becoming more prevalent because they provide the opportunity to mix in the story behind the innovation, but in a way that is a much more engaging experience than putting it in a dot-com," P&G Global Design Officer Phil Duncan told me.
"We've made this a key component of all of our business strategies to think about the virtual worlds."
The metaverse, a term first coined by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in 1992, is a proposed new iteration of the internet where websites and content will be represented by 3-D virtual environments that users will navigate through using avatars or 3-D characters that they design.
P&G's LifeLab looks a lot like that. Attendees at its virtual CES – and the general public – can create their own digital avatar which is placed in the LifeLab and used to travel to different areas, view exhibits, attend panel discussions and interact with virtual attendees.
One area of the LifeLab, devoted to a new partnership with luxury automaker Bugatti and the upscale Gillette razor produced from that joint effort, houses a virtual Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport, the car that served as the razor's inspiration. Virtual attendees can walk around the virtual environment and see a giant model of the razor come apart to show off the different technologies inside of it; a video game within the exhibit uses gaming to show off how some of that technology works.
In the BeautySphere, also new for CES 2022, attendees can view panel discussions featuring discussions with P&G researchers, brand experts and Kelsey Impicciche, a celebrity popular on the live-streaming video game platform Twitch. There is a gamified experience with London's Royal Botanic Gardens, where attendees can pick seeds and learn about the plants they become and how those make it into P&G products and the benefits they are supposed to provide.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a video announcing his company's name change and ambitions for the metaverse, described a platform where consumers will buy goods and services, communicate with friends and family and work with their colleagues in a more immersive way than they do now, blurring the lines between the virtual and physical.
While that may be a ways off, Duncan sees a near future in which the LifeLab can be a bigger part of how consumers interact with P&G.
A platform like the LifeLab takes a lot of resources to host online, and then to staff to have P&G personnel available to guide attendees, answer questions and facilitate the experience. After CES 2021, it was used again for short-term engagements like the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (held in July 2021 after being postponed due to Covid-19) and for Earth Day 2021.
But at some point, Duncan believes the LifeLab will be flipped on and then not turned back off.
"We're trying to make sure we create stories that can be more self-driving so they don't require 24-hour P&G people being active in the space," he said.
The LifeLab allows the consumer goods maker to give consumers a way to learn about P&G products, meet the innovators and inventors behind them and do it in a manner that is more interactive, engaging and fun than reading text on a screen or watching a video.
"If I were a soothsayer, this will be the way we reach more and more of a global audience," Duncan said.
