META This! Series Ep.4 - The Voice Sings a Virtual Tune in the Metaverse

Illustration by @max_gps

META This! Series Ep. 4

David talks with Justin Hochberg, the CEO of Virtual Brand Group about The Voice, now a virtual world, and the huge consumer potential of Decentraland and Roblox.

Podcast Transcript:

David Schnider:

Welcome to the latest episode of Nolan Heinemann. Look, Legal's of this podcast. Today I have with me Justin Hochberg, the CEO of Virtual Brand Group. Justin has been with us before. Justin, last time we talked, we were talking about the Metaverse and the opportunities in the Metaverse. But today I wanted to get a lot more specific. I know your company has recently launched a couple of exciting experiences in the Metaverse, and I want to talk to you specifically about those and understand how users are actually interacting in the Metaverse.

So, one of those experiences I know you recently launched The Voice, and I was hoping you could tell us about that.

Justin Hochberg:

Thanks, David, for having me here. It's always a pleasure. You ask excellent questions. And the great news about this is I don't have to pay you for this time. So that's part of the reason why I do this podcast, because I figure I can ask any question and not actually get charged. So, with that said, let me tell you about The Voice.

So, most people know of The Voice is airing on NBC. It's actually a much bigger entertainment asset. It's owned by a company called ITV out of Europe, and it airs in 180 territories worldwide, which makes it one of the most distributed brands in any category, food, beverage, sports, etc. in fact, it's in more places than Disney or Nike.

The only two brands that are in more places worldwide are Coke and God. And I think we could maybe say that God's got different segments. So, I don't know that that's one common brand, but nonetheless, it's in a lot of places. And so, if you think about that idea, it's a singing competition where people go on a journey to, as we like to say, find their voice and compete for the attention of celebrity coaches like Blake Shelton or Chance the Rapper or Kelly Clarkson or Niall Horan this year on NBC.

And it's got a loyal following. I think it's like one of the number one shows in America and all the major markets, of course. And what we've done is taken the essence of that experience, which is finding your voice and built out a virtual world. And the best way to understand that is think about Disney World. It's got rides, it's got food, it's got trams, it's got hotels, it's got a fastpass, it's got merchandise.

And once you go in there, what's magical about Disney amongst every other type of theme park is the only thing you can experience. Everything is Disneyfied. They pumping in music and sounds. They don't even have other brands. They're like, if you buy ice cream, it doesn't say Haagen-Dazs. And so it's a completely unified experience. So we have built the virtual equivalent of that for The Voice, where you can still dance to go on a musical scavenger hunt, test your knowledge, collect cool merchandise, etc.

David Schnider:

So let's start with the basics. How do people actually get to this? Where is it?

Justin Hochberg:

Yeah. So, here's the great thing about the question and I have refined my answer to the question which you haven't asked, but I'm going to ask myself, the Metaverse, what is it? And what I say is, look, people get confused when they hear that made up term, which largely comes from a book in 1992. So, it's not even really a real term.

It's just a marketing phrase from a throwaway, a book. The Metaverse is just another word for a website or set of technologies that you can access over any device. So you and I are zooming right now, and every experience that I'm describing is accessible from your iPhone, your Samsung, your laptop. It doesn't make a difference. And all you have to do, just like going to Amazon, is go to Decentraland, which is the equivalent of Amazon.

That's the place. And just within there, search for The Voice and there's where you find it and it costs you nothing to go on. And then once you are there you create an avatar, which is a 3D miniature of you. You dress it, you pick your hair, your look, your style, whatever you want to pick. And you can change that.

And then you go off and you play. It's the ultimate form of dress up, right? We've been playing with dolls and dressing up since humanity started.

David Schnider:

One of the guests I had on this podcast referred to the way that users interact in the Metaverse when it's non-VR as pancake mode because it's 2D, which I kind of like. So when you're accessing Decentraland really anything in it, I assume you don't have to be in VR- pancake mode works just fine.

Justin Hochberg:

There is no VR for most of these experiences. There's four things that I tell people to help them understand at the beginning of any presentation I ever do about the Metaverse and if I may, I will just sort of go around the clock in this. It's kind of a really effective chart, but it starts at 12:00 with the first piece of information.

And the first piece of information is scale. The Metaverse can be accessed by any device that can connect to the Internet, and 85% of the world has access to a smartphone. I don't mean a flip phone from 1990. I mean a smartphone that's close to 7 billion people. Okay. So that's access within that subset today, not predicted tomorrow by McKinsey,

But right now there are approximately 600 million people or call it 15% of the total addressable market using some form of the Metaverse every month. Okay. That's a pretty large segment, both in terms of percent and numbers for a nascent industry, especially when you think about when the Internet started and I worked at Microsoft then, there were probably 10,000 academics using it to share research papers.

So 600 million versus 10,000 books is a lot higher on the growth curve. So that's current demographic. The third thing is behavior patterns. The big idea here is just like using an iPhone changed the way we started interacting and buying things, right? So it's called a phone, but we don’t only use it as a phone. It's really a portal to everything else.

Justin Hochberg:

If you look at your screen time rating, it's like 99% apps and 1% phone calls. So behavior pattern modification is fundamental. And in this instance, over 50% of Gen Z, which is really what you want to hook, because they're the hardest to reach, say that they will discover a brand first in the Metaverse, which means that if you're not there within 3 to 5 years, your brand is irrelevant.

Just like Netflix dethroned Blockbuster or any challenger brand dethroned an incumbent. So behavior bad. And the last thing is just time. A lot of people in a slide deck might say how much money can you make? And that's important. Or what percentage of market share. And that's important. What I think is a common denominator is how much time does a human being have?

And the great news is we all have the same amount. So if you are a brand, you are fighting for that percent of time. The average consumer spends approximately 44 hours on TikTok a month, and that's the number one social media app and probably the number one use of time of anything. Right, besides probably sleeping and working, to go down from there

YouTube is somewhere in the thirties. Facebook, Instagram in the teens, Netflix about ten. If you add all of those up, they're like somewhere in the high seventies. Roblox, another Metaverse-like platform, the average consumer spends 78 hours a month just there. So you got a giant addressable market, you got a lot of people already doing this thing, you got the people doing this thing being the ones that are paying attention and that's where they're getting their primary information.

And then you've got the amount of time spent there. And so you put that together and you start thinking these virtual worlds are not a substitute for social media or TV advertising or print media. They are a transformation of how we engage with other human beings, brands, and services.

David Schnider:

Yeah, I think it's a completely different thing, right? Because when you're watching a YouTube video, it's passive, you're absorbing content. When you're in the Metaverse, you typically, the point is you're interacting with at least an environment and often other people and often friends. It's a way to socialize.

I think that last word is the most fundamental piece to it. A lot of people think of the things like Roblox or other things as games, and let's just think about like, Call of Duty or the Mosquito? or Madden NFL. That is a game. And the definition in Webster of a game is a constructed scenario where there's a set of rules.

The thing about these worlds are, yeah, there's rules in Disney World, just like they are a Roblox. But within that construct, you can do whatever you want. And so it's much more like going to the park with your friends and a Frisbee than it is like being put into a maze. And because of that, it's got a limited amount of and this is the ultimate choose your own adventure book, if you'll remember that from when we were kids.

David Schnider:

I do. And actually it's making me think back to a number of years ago when I was playing online Red Dead Revolver. I think it was back then, we would go online with friends. We didn't really care what the objectives were. It was more about talking and trying out different things in the game and having fun together. And I think that's really what distinguishes a Metaverse experience from the more passive experiences, even of playing a video game.

Justin Hochberg:

Yeah. If I may just say honestly, you know, you also know that we just launched literally this week. Barbie's virtual collection. Barbie is obviously one of the hottest trends this summer with the feature film coming out. Pink is everywhere. There's a hashtag Barbie corp we are working with Forever 21 and Mattel Forever 21 created a physical fashion line that's in stores.

Justin Hochberg:

We created a companion virtual fashion line, which both mimics the in-store and also is totally new exclusive virtual items. We can talk more about that. But what I want to do, if you don't mind, is connect the bigger dots between The Voice, Decentraland, Roblox, Barbie, and anything else. And that is, the story is, social media promised us a change in the way we interact.

It promised us a social experience. It promised us data. It promised us a community, all of which has really not lived up to its expectation. In fact, we are, it has harvested us as data like in the Matrix. It has created people addicted to dopamine hits because engineers configure it that way. It has increasingly become less effective. The average click through rate on Facebook is 0.98%, which is this small amount, It's less than 1%. And so in that world, the question becomes is what takes the place of that? And everything we work on right? So if broadcast is collapsed and then social media is not delivering and streaming is in disarray. What I would say to you is the story isn't the virtual world of virtual fashion. It is the next iteration of consumer marketing.

David Schnider:

So I appreciate that. But I want to talk about some of the specifics and understand how users, whether it's The Voice or Forever 21, experience in Roblox with the Barbie, and what are users actually doing in these experiences? What kinds of things are they experiencing together?

Justin Hochberg:

So let's just take Roblox as an example, because that's by far the most publicly well-known one, because it's literally been around for 19 years. I think a lot of people don't know that, two it's a public company, so there's a lot of information. And three, it's probably got the easiest user interface and as a result, the total number of people who are on that platform on a monthly basis is somewhere around 220 million people, which that's a lot, right? Yeah.

At one point. At one point a year or so ago, I think I remember seeing a statistic that was like, you know, 70% of every 9- to 12-year-olds spend time on Roblox every week. Right? So Roblox is a platform much like Facebook is a platform. However, where Roblox differs is anybody can build anything on top of that.

I guess at Facebook you can build your own page. So there's the analogy, but Roblox, there's like 50 or 60 million different experiences. And so once you create your avatar, you can go to any of these things and do whatever there is to do. And some of them are built by kids. There's a pizza parlor where you can actually have a job or an in-game currency, right?

In fact, my teenager has a job, won't pick up his shoes, but has a pizza job. Right. You can also go do things with like the NFL or with Sonic the Hedgehog or Hello Kitty. And of course, with Forever 21 and every one of those experiences just like I guess any experience in real life or any store, any restaurant is its own world.

So in Forever 21’s world, we took the fashion idea and we gamified it and we created a version of Monopoly where you get to build your own store and run your own store. And the more that you succeed at doing that, which means merchandizing it correctly, handling consumers, selling more stuff, building it best, whatever, that is kind of like a Sim.

You get more options and more and more and more and it builds bigger, bigger, bigger. And that's how you earn leaderboard and rewards and all that stuff. Now what's also true about these worlds are besides the structured gameplay, there's open play and so in our world you might not want to do that all the time. You might want to take the fashion that you wear and put on your own fashion show.

We have an amphitheater where people perform. We have food trucks where you might want to hang out and meet a friend. We have a parkour course where you might want to do that. And so again, back to the analogy of Disney World, these are multifaceted experiences that way transcend, say, a store. So to speak.

David Schnider:

So how does Barbie factor into that?

Justin Hochberg:

Well, Barbie is obviously a fashion line, right? And so for us, what we've created is the virtual fashion that can be worn in, anywhere on Roblox. So you can wear it in the Sonic or the Hello Kitty or the NFL's space. So we are empowering self-expression, right? That's what fashion is virtually or physically. You dress the way you want to be seen in the world or you see yourself.

And virtual fashion is an even more advanced way of doing that because your closets are unlimited, your items never go out of style. You can never eat too much chocolate where they don't fit, you know, all those things. And you can change in a second and you don't have to go home and change. So Barbie fits into this model of it's a coveted brand.

I think they sell almost 150 or 200 units of Real Barbie every minute. So in just our time alone, they've sold thousands and thousands. And so we have created this virtual Barbie collection. You can wear that everywhere and you can go feel like you are part of that, which means you, you know, and it's not just regular clothing, like a shirt or shorts.

We have things called auras. So, you know, obviously we always look for ways that we can make a virtual experience different. So, you know, you sometimes go to work and you're feeling really sparkly and great and you feel just great about yourself. So imagine what the visual would look like if you were in an animated movie, right? It would probably have like sunshine or moonbeams or rainbows circling you.

But in Roblox we sell, literally, that stuff and it's so in this instance, it's like floating palm trees and suns around you. So you walk around with this aura of feeling Malibu Barbie that expresses yourself. So that's how Barbie shows up. And of course, there's Barbie play patterns and all that stuff.

David Schnider:

So in any of these experiences, what's the benefit for the brands who are getting involved and licensing out their properties for use in the Metaverse?

Justin Hochberg:

Yeah. So right now there are two business models, principally for brands. One is marketing. So they build these experiences just like they build a pop up or take over some place at Times Square or any high traffic area and they get you to interact with them and sell their message to you. A great example of someone doing that in Roblox for is Alo Yoga.

They have this wellness center. They talk a lot about mental health, they talk about wellness, they do yoga classes and they pitch the lifestyle of living healthy, right? And they give away lots of free merchandise, right? So their goal is to get you to come in there, have a positive experience, take away some educational stuff, and then walk around the rest of the Roblox universe wearing Alo branded stuff.

And they measure that in probably some media metric, right? So that's one. And that is typically the way most new technologies are treated, right? I have this theory about something's new and somebody says to the Internet, check it out. You're young enough to understand it. At some point the Internet goes, Hey, I think this is a thing and someone in marketing takes it over because they're like, It's a thing, but I don't know how to make money over it.

And then it becomes a CMO thing and then eventually it goes from a CMO thing to a business unit thing. And that's the second model, which is what we pursue, which is, look, marketing is great and we do a heck of a lot of it for The Voice or Forever 21. I think last year alone there were 600 articles written about our experience on Roblox with Forever 21, multiple millions of dollars of earned media.

But ultimately I'm in the business of creating a business. And so we sell the merchandise. We sell the ability to upgrade your experience in the game, etc..

David Schnider:

So I'm curious when it comes to The Voice. I assume there's a fashion component, there's a merchandise component, but are people actually singing and performing and is there’s a tie-in to the shows?

Justin Hochberg:

Yeah, the answer is when we thought about The Voice, obviously you think of it as a singing competition, but what we did, like we do with anything is we deconstruct the experience that you're used to into its components. And so if you think about the show and what it takes to win that show or who's on that show, it's many facets, right?

You have to have a stage presence. You probably have to have some form of dance moves, you know, be able to move around and showcase your fluidity performing. You have to have a style. You have to probably have music knowledge, right? And of course, then you have to know how to compete in a variety of things. And they have these battle rounds where you're head-to-head and you got to stand out and then of course you need to sing. So that's the variety of different experiences in Decentraland right now. There are some technical limitations, and so the singing component is not yet part of phase one, which just launched last week, but it is going to be very soon. The other question you ask is how does it tie into the show? And so right now it ties into the show in as much as we have an entire section for NBC’s exact show.

So you can go into the NBC fan zone where you can see the coaches that are currently on the show. There's this musical scavenger hunt and, this is exciting. There is limited edition virtual merchandise for the first time ever in the history, that mirrors the merchandise that the real celebrities give to their teams on the TV show.

So Kelly Clarkson, if you're on her team competing, you get a red satin jacket. Now, if you go into the NBC zone and you compete a series of challenges, you win Kelly Clarkson's limited edition satin jacket. And so that's how we connect it. Now, that's phase one, just like Disney built phase one, and then it built multiple phases.

But over time, what you will see is more networks across the world, more integration with the show. Imagine the show being in the Metaverse and the Metaverse elements being in the show and ideally making it cross-platform, because that's where consumers are simultaneously. And that is going to take a while. But, you know, in our world, a while means this year, not three years.

David Schnider:

I was going to ask, could you see a version where they do an episode of the show or a season of the show even that is in the Metaverse in Decentraland or another platform where you have instead of live people on the stage, people competing with their avatars to be the next singer there.

Justin Hochberg:

Well, look, I can't speak for the TV show because that's the TV show. What I can tell you is this right now, if you think about competition shows, let's take Project Runway, a classic fashion show. Right? You could go into Roblox and see many different experiences that offer that similar experience of creating an object, getting on a runway and people voting.

If you're talking about race car driving. Right, you know, NASCAR or Formula One, I think there's like thousands of race car games already on the platform of Roblox. So in terms of a voice singing competition, what I can see happening is not taking the TV show into the Metaverse because the TV show is brilliant and viscerally beautiful and it's got the celebrities.

But I could see when the show is not on us hosting our own competitions to fill the gap so that there isn't a gap. It's like I always thought about it. Coca-Cola is like the number one product in the world, right, for like one of them, and they sell it all year round. But there's these brands, whether it's the NFL or The Voice, which just aren't all year round.

And so every year they have to start this up. And so does that present an opportunity to allow people who would never be able to audition, never be able to come to L.A. or Paris or or, you know, the capitals where these shows air and allow them to do this. Absolutely. And would that be super exciting? Yeah, it would be unbelievable.

And it would be global in nature.

David Schnider:

You hear about the long tail of retail that's kind of like the long tail of content. I think about TV shows or you have Star Wars and you can go watch the movies, but when they're over, they're over. And Disney does a good job now of connecting you with merchandise and collectible sales and even high-end experiences. But virtual experiences create a potential way to really extend the fan interaction and give them something a lot more interactive or tangible that they can do to connect with the property 365 Instead of just those few moments they're watching the movie.

Justin Hochberg:

So yes, and what I would add to that it's increasing frequency. It's much deeper because of the experience, right? I mean, you're not talking about just sitting in a movie theater for 2 hours, or watching your show for an hour or stepping into a retail store for 20 minutes. So it's a deeper thing and it's also more multidimensional because unlike going into a store where all I'm doing is looking for an item, I'm now doing a variety of things.

Again, back to the social nature of it. So it's those three dimensions that make this powerful.

David Schnider:

I'm curious in terms of demographics, and I don't know if you know, but what are some of the age groups who are actually getting involved in these experiences and trying out either The Voice, Barbie, Decentraland, Roblox, who's actually doing this?

Justin Hochberg:

Well, So here's what I would say. The history of adoption generally starts with youth culture, right? So the first people to use YouTube were all young people who were like, Well, this is great, this is easy, this is free, this is cheap. And people that were C-suite executives are like, this is never going to be anything. No one's ever going to want to watch some nobodies, you know, unboxing videos, right? That's never going to work.

Incorrect, right? 

David Schnider:

Yeah, it turns out it worked. Okay.

Justin Hochberg:

So if you took a snapshot of the first group of Instagram users, the first group of Internet users, the first group of website users, the first group of social media users, they'd all be younger people, right? Probably in their teens at best. However, over time, two things happened. These things, when they take off, become ubiquitous, right? And so everybody's like, well, you know, I should be using a website, I should be using the Internet.

I don't this didn't just be for hobbyists, right? And then the other thing is those young people who started out at age 12 because, you know, with YouTube become 35 and that's why video games, the average person who owns and X-Box or PlayStation console, which was always thought to be some like young boy in their teens trapped in a basement, is like a mother of two at age 38.

Right. And so that's just the truth of it. Now to your specific question. Today, we are still on the earlier stages of things because it's an early adoption, but for example, just taking Roblox three years ago, I think like 70% of their audience was under 12, 13, 14, 15, something like that. Today, only 50% of their audience is under 13 and they've aged up every year by like ten or 20%.

And that's because people are getting older. The platform is getting more sophisticated with greater graphics and new experiences, and simply because Roblox knows that to survive, they can't let people age out. Because if you're losing your customers, that's, you know, you have to replace them. So they're highly incented to make that work.

David Schnider:

And I think they've been updating graphics and doing other things to try and approach a more mature audience. Right?

Justin Hochberg:

Right. Absolutely. And one of the things that they did early on in which we rode a wave on, they realized that brands are sticky. What do kids do when they’re teenagers? They go to the mall, they go, right, that's it. What are the things in the mall shops with brands.

David Schnider:

Yeah.

Justin Hochberg:

Okay. So that insight led them to reach out to people like us and for us to get on there with Forever 21 because that, you know, in their perception, that would make it stickier. So they do many things to do that.

David Schnider:

So one of the interesting ideas that I've seen emerging recently is whether there might be, you know, right now each of these Metaverses are individual platforms owned by a single company. In most cases, you go to one place or you go to the other. And one of those platforms is Fortnite, which is owned by Epic Games and Tim Sweeney, who I think is the CEO of the company, just recently gave a speech where he said that they actually, to my surprise, like the idea of interoperability.

Now, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised because they want to build and control the tools to empower that interoperability. Then curious what you think about that and whether that's a viable path forward for this technology.

Justin Hochberg:

At the beginning of any story, any possibility exists. Now there's two competing examples that I think you can look to, which is to say that by human nature, whether you go back to tens of thousands of years ago, where you go back to recent developments in social media with like Meta, humans tend to aggregate, they collect themselves in units, whether they're small farming communities or major cities or countries, etc.

So there is a natural tendency for a business to want to aggregate and create barriers to prevent leaving. So walled gardens like Facebook has done that, Apple has done that, etc. At the same time, in certain instances, interoperability has been what the unlock has been. So just think about the dawn of the PC age. The fact that you could use windows on any computer, is why Microsoft beat Apple, even though Apple was a better product, right?

They had 25 or 50 manufacturers of every product in every country just cranking these things out. You just couldn't compete at that scale. It's the same reason why VHS tapes beat Betamax tape. Betamax was a closed system. Only Sony made it. VHS was a licensed technology. It's the reason why DVDs exists, right? They weren't manufactured by one, but there was a common standard.

It's the reason why the Internet works and HTML standard that everybody lives by. It's the reason why wire transfers work bank to bank. It's the same exact thing everywhere in the world, right? So it's unclear which model will win or if there will be both. Tim Sweeney is unique because he seems to be, so to speak, a Robin Hood like character.

And although he's certainly got his own agenda owning the tools, he does take a more, I'd say, open minded stance to what this could be. And I would say it would be a real shame if we repeated the same mistakes and just got ourselves locked into a bunch of walled gardens again like we have today.

David Schnider:

The other concept I want to talk to you about is I've noticed social media and the Internet have enabled marketing to fracture and for communities to form where people within trust can really find each other and dig down deeper. You don't necessarily need to be on TV or you have a huge platform to be able to share an interest in something and I'm curious whether you think the Metaverse will really accelerate that and help people who have similar interests, even, you know, niche interests, find each other and build and share experiences around those interests that are not necessarily controlled by large content companies.

Justin Hochberg:

Well, it's interesting you mentioned that I read a recent report and it said that there's a current thought that people are migrating away from these math platforms. Let's just call it like Facebook because of all the negativity and all of this sort of like spam and harvesting of your data. And the term is called cozy corners. So. Right, you may have heard that.

And if you go to like, like Discord, that's a good example or Reddit or Substack, you know, there's a place where it's like, I like this exact thing and I want to hang with these people. And that that's kind of what Facebook user groups were supposed to be. But, you know, they became abused or not exactly what they were supposed to be.

And so I think there is a constant thing where, look, Facebook started out as a small community that you had to have a Harvard dot edu email, and then it became a couple of colleges and then it was everyone, right? So these things start from niche to mass to niche. In fact, this is a hilarious to me. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner. Just was quoted the other day at a conference that said he thinks that streaming services, because they're so challenged for the economics and the competing for the consumers should self- bundle so that you could buy a bundle of HBO with Netflix with Paramount, which sounds a lot like cable TV's bundle from just five years ago. Yes, right.

David Schnider:

I'm in because I'm paying for all of them separately now.

Justin Hochberg:

Well, that's why a bundle works. But it's not you know, listen, I worked at Microsoft and we say a bundle works, but this was slightly before my time. But one of the biggest fallouts at Microsoft was when the launch of Windows Suite came out. Do you sell it as individual products, you know, PowerPoint versus Excel versus Word? And there was a whole group of people said you have to and there was another group who said, bundle it.

And the bundle team worked. And the fact that people bundled was what made all of those products so successful because you no longer needed to, like convince someone to go try it. You're like, look, I only really want word, but now that I have PowerPoint, I'm going to use that instead of go buy something else. Bundling works. It's not rocket science.

David Schnider:

All right. So I want to wrap up, but I want to ask you, I've heard some rumors that you guys have some new initiatives coming out. Is there anything you can share with us about new projects you guys will be announcing in the future?

Justin Hochberg:

Well, if I shared it with you, that would then mean I could announce it in the future. It seems like the opposite of what I would be doing by that. 

David Schnider:

Worth a try. Come on.

Justin Hochberg:

Yeah. Yeah. So the answer is, look, we work with all brands across sports, entertainment, fashion and beauty, and we roll them out very methodically. We work across all different platforms. So what you can likely see is a lot more virtual fashion, a lot more activation on The Voice. One of the things that we are really excited about that we haven't talked much about is rewards.

So I think everybody knows buy nine Starbucks get a tenth for free, or fly American Airlines and earn miles, but the reward system is kind of broken and inefficient because it relies on outdated technology that doesn't really allow you to own the assets. And so we are working on these things where you have your sort of virtual wallet, where you collect these things, you own these things, you can trade these things, these things are personalized to you and it will transform your relationship with brands. And to Starbucks and Nike's credit, if you're interested in this topic, you should go check out what they're doing because they're at the forefront of this. But that's something that I think is going to be hugely valuable on a slower burn than virtual worlds of virtual fashion. But ultimately be more transformational.

David Schnider:

All right. So if people want to learn more about your company and follow what you guys are doing, where can they find you?

Justin Hochberg:

Virtual Brand Group.com has case studies and recent press. Justin Hochberg's LinkedIn has musings, video press announcements, things that I'm finding other people doing that are exciting. And of course, you can grab me at the Virtual Brand Group Twitter at “justbevirtual” just be virtual any of those places or you can call David Schnider and he can bill you for it and connect us.

David Schnider:

Fantastic. Justin It's always a pleasure talking to you. I love the insights you share and I look forward to having you on again.