Metaverse advertising and promotional effectiveness: The route from immersion to joy

The emerging technologies, immersive systems, and metaverse are evolving at a rapid pace. These advancements are creating and offering unique opportunities for individuals, platforms, and businesses through virtual interactions. This proliferation is also gathering attention of marketeers and advertising agencies as the metaverse can conduct campaigns with a recreational touch. However, little is known about the constituents that are essential for metaverse advertising. Furthermore, the role of such unexplored elements on promotional effectiveness is also unknown. This study captures first-hand expressions of netizens about metaverse to explore and identify the constituents underlying metaverse advertising and their influence on promotional effectiveness. We observe immersion as the key constituent in fostering joy which mediates the effectiveness of metaverse advertising. We therefore inform the practice to design immersive advertising campaigns which can spur positive emotions. We also elaborate the role of technology preparedness and metaverse based communities in shaping the future of such innovative form of advertising. We guide future technology developers to concentrate on platform interoperability and underscore the role of social media influencers for channelling endorsements to ensure promotional effectiveness.