Then there was this Ad Age headline that started with “Future of Chief Metaverse Officer: How Brands are Rethinking Future of Web 3.0.”  Full stop.

You mean there’s such a thing as a CMO, with the “M” meaning metaverse? 

Talk about a disturbance in the Force. As someone who prides their own damn selves on keeping up with the industry’s latest and leastest, I clearly missed the digital boat on this one.

Or maybe that’s my own bias at work. Even given the proclivity of the bigs to ring Pavlov’s bell whenever they spot the next shiny object, I’d never have pictured credible players like Disney or Gucci going so far down the virtual brick road they’d consider creating a C-level slot for a landscape still largely populated by legless avatars, mind-blowingly expensive ephemera, and sugar plum vapor.

Gets me wondering about the qualifications for the gig. A ready supply of psychoactive gummies? The ability to dream in color? A fund of aha meeting-stoppers like, “beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder, it’s in her headset.” Here, even ChatGPT-4 is no help: “As of my last update, the term "Chief Metaverse Officer" was not yet officially recognized or widely used in the business world.”

Now comes the tragic news: seems the masters of the universe who decided to dump major coin into ill-defined next web possibilities have, equally suddenly, pressed flush. And, speaking of the Chat-bro, we know why—your two-letter clue starts with the letter “A.”

Of course, jumping like a spawning trout at this glittering lure isn’t as simple as all that. At least with the metaverse, a brand could signal commitment without having to re-engrave so much as a corner office nameplate—CMO becomes Chief Metaverse Officer, easy squeeze. It’s harder to be facile when trying to impress Wall Street—or maybe blur memories of that huge Web 3 waste—with fealty to AI.  

Converting the CMO position to Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, or even creating a CAIO position in the first place, isn’t just an HR choice, it’s a strategic decision. And those inevitably come with very hard to reverse consequences. Particularly if part of the plan involves gutting in-house or external marketing resources—or both—on the theory that, hell, generative AI is right on the verge, and at price point ridiculously lower than your average art or copy meat puppet.

I’d argue that isn’t just shortsighted, it’s full-on macular degeneration and for three reasons: current performance, projected capabilities, and inherent backward-facing data limitations. But that’s for another meander and this one is best concluded with an observation.

While there’s no doubt AI is part of the future, the scars from those billion-dollar metaverse losses are anything but virtual.  Maybe this time we look first?