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Here’s a number that should haunt every CMO who’s ever stood in a boardroom and declared a “bold new vision.”
$88 billion.
That’s what Meta spent across seven years on the Metaverse. More than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo programme. More than the GDP of several small countries. All of it poured into a product that, at its lowest point, had an estimated 900 daily active users.
Nine hundred people.
Yet the Metaverse didn’t fail because the technology wasn’t ready. It failed because almost every fundamental principle of brand strategy, consumer behaviour, and market creation was violated simultaneously. And the people doing the violating were too deep in their own narrative to notice. This is the story of how that happens. And more usefully, how you stop it happening to you.
