Cyber Beach: Wunderman Thompson Unveils Its Virtual Incarnation At Cannes

The Cannes ad festival just hit a new platform.

Wunderman Thompson has unveiled the WT Inspiration Beach, an immersive metaverse activity at the prestigious festival held each year in France.

The virtual entity allows visitors to see how the agency approaches innovation, content and networking in a singular way.

Collaboration areas, a networking lounge area and a showcase of Wunderman Thompson’s most creative pieces of work are all part of the company’s Inspiration Beach. It was custom-built with premier metaverse platform Odyssey.

Additional attractions, such as an interactive shopping space and a DJ booth, will be unveiled later this week to keep visitors engaged in novel ways.

Sustainability, IE&D, data and technology, brand creativity and effectiveness, talent and business transformation are among the important industry themes presented by Wunderman Thompson’s inspiration kiosks, which are located along the virtual beach.

“At Wunderman Thompson, we are always looking for inventive methods to offer a more inclusive consumer experience,” said Gareth Jones, senior vice president, global marketing. This is why we’re launching the WT Inspiration Beach, a virtual engagement in the metaverse that will allow our clients and colleagues all around the world to experience our take on creation in a one-of-a-kind and extremely immersive setting.”

“As brands seek to enter the metaverse, many are going to Wunderman Thompson, who are thought leaders in this arena,” said Reid Santabarbara, CEO of Odyssey.

“We’re able to present these ambitious businesses with the most accessible, highest-visual-fidelity streaming metaverse platform on the market today, thanks to our collaboration,” he said. Our product team, led by Odyssey CTO Maxime Long, has captured the creativity and inspiration of advertising’s biggest festival and provided an experience that showcases the metaverse’s boundless possibilities in building the WT Inspiration Beach.”

Wunderman Thompson was one of the first advertising companies to develop their own metaverse, unveiling it at CES 2022. The global network released two original reports about the rise of this new frontier of customer experience: “Into the Metaverse,” which was released in September 2021, and the follow-up report, “New Realities: Into the Metaverse and Beyond,” which was released in May 2022 and found that awareness of the metaverse had more than doubled in less than a year.

Wunderman Thompson is a unit of WPP, which dubs itself as “the creative transformation company.”

On July 12 at 11 a.m. EST, a group of experts will gather at the WT Inspiration Beach to recap the prestigious Cannes Lions 2022 awards. They will discuss the work that won and the trends that shaped one of the world’s leading festivals of creativity.

Produced in association with MetaNews.