Days after rebranding to Meta, social media giant, formerly known as Facebook debuted its first brand campaign. The first advertisement from the firm shows a classic painting that celebrates the possibilities of the metaverse as the battle in this space heats up. A group of friends is seen looking at some classic 2D paintings and one of them, with a tiger preying on a buffalo illustrates Meta's ambitious goals and also highlights the possibilities of virtual experiences and the metaverse.
With the rebranding, Zuckerberg is betting big on on what he sees as the future of the internet as he thinks it will be a part of the digital economy.
This comes almost a week after its founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was rebranding its name to Meta Platforms Inc or simply Meta amid waning popularity and rising controversies. Earlier this week, the social networking giant announced it will pull the plug on its automatic facial recognition feature for photos and videos after a decade citing concerns. The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company said it will also delete the face scan data of over one billion users. This feature, notably, has raised a lot of privacy concerns in the past.
"We’re shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook. People who’ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos and we will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates," Jerome Pesenti, VP of Artificial Intelligence, Facebook, had written in a blog post.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, while announcing the name change, said they now want to be known as a metaverse company, and that the existing name could not "possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future".
The battle in the metaverse space is heating up as tech behemoths have started to explore its possibilities. Earlier this week, after Facebook, Microsoft said it was also ready to launch its own version where its users can collaborate and interact in 3D digital avatars. At the annual Ignite 2021 conference, Microsoft announced Mesh for its video conferencing platform Teams that will allow users to interact in collaborative and shared holographic experiences.