BMW is shaping the future of individual mobility and is also creating a new and unique brand experience in the virtual world. With its JOYTOPIA streaming platform, the premium car manufacturer has created its own metaverse that takes corporate and brand communication to a new level and has now been awarded a Grand Prix by the Art Directors Club (ADC) for Germany as the outstanding innovation of the year in the digital area. On JOYTOPIA, users can immerse themselves in the virtual world of BMW and collect individual experiences in digital space with their avatar. JOYTOPIA is freely accessible to all fans worldwide and gives them a “massive multiplayer real-time online experience. Mindblowing, consciousness-expanding. Benchmark” is how the ADC jury rates it.
JOYTOPIA is currently the virtual venue for the world premiere of the new BMW iX1. With a new digital environment, special effects for the all-electric Sports Activity Vehicle and advanced avatar technology, the BMW Metaverse accessible at www.bmw.com/dreams provides an even more inspiring and multi-faceted digital brand experience. For example, users can now generate their avatar based on a selfie and thus transfer their own personality into the metaverse. It is also possible to equip the avatar with a true-to-the-original hoodie from the BMW Lifestyle Collection and send it on a voyage of discovery beyond JOYTOPIA to any other metaverse that also uses Ready Player Me technology to create avatars.
The JOYTOPIA streaming platform went online for the first time at the International Motor Show IAA Mobility 2021 – as a digital event on the worldwide web that gives young target groups in particular a new perspective on the topics of electric mobility, circular economy and sustainability and was launched with a virtual concert by the British band Coldplay. With their self-designed avatar, users were able to move freely in front of the virtual stage as well as in the BMW theme worlds, interacting, exploring new products, taking selfies and posting them on social media. They were welcomed and guided through the surreal worlds of the JOYTOPIA metaverse by a virtual fox with the voice of Hollywood actor and Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz.
”Our goal was to create a new brand experience for fans all over the world in parallel to the real motorshow appearance in Munich, expressing BMW’s progressive attitude, innovative strength and readiness for the future,“ says Stefan Ponikva, Head of BMW Brand Communication and Experience. So JOYTOPIA was not simply a virtual motorshow stand with live streaming presentations, but a completely digital brand world that permits intensive interaction and dialogue with the audience and is accessible in full HD resolution on end devices of any kind, regardless of whether PC, tablet or smartphone, free of charge and without registration. JOYTOPIA was developed by Jung von Matt as part of the lead agency The Game and in cooperation with ”Journee“, a leading global technology platform for metaverse experiences.
Already on the premiere day of JOYTOPIA at IAA Mobility more than 150,000 visits from more than 30 countries registered with an average duration of almost 13 minutes. In the further course, JOYTOPIA also achieved around 42.8 million contacts on TikTok. BMW’s own metaverse played a key role in ensuring that the brand’s sustainability messages at IAA Mobility achieved a response that was unique in the competitive environment. The ADC jury was also deeply impressed, rating JOYTOPIA as ”a work that greeted us with a talking fox and left us completely amazed“.
”With our own metaverse, we have created a platform for dialogue and interaction with the audience that is a permanent part of our brand and corporate communication,“ explains Stefan Ponikva. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022 as well, JOYTOPIA offered fans around the world the opportunity to explore the premium automaker’s latest products and innovations in the digital landscapes of the BMW Metaverse.
In addition, the forms of presentation developed for JOYTOPIA offer completely new possibilities for linking experiences in the real and virtual worlds. Already at IAA Mobility, the JOYTOPIA event was also integrated into the BMW press conference at the motorshow stand in Munich. In the run-up to the design fair ”Salone del Mobile” (7. – 12 June 2022) in Milan, the new, all-electric BMW iX1 will now be the protagonist of a spectacular presentation film, which can be seen both on a 3D billboard in the northern Italian city and in the digital world of JOYTOPIA.
Fuel consumption, CO2 emission figures and power consumption were measured using the methods required according to Regulation VO (EC) 2007/715 as amended. They refer to vehicles on the German automotive market. For ranges, the WLTP figures take into account the effects of any optional equipment.
All figures are already calculated on the basis of the new WLTP test cycle. WLTP values are used as a basis for the assessment of taxes and other vehicle-related levies that are (also) based on CO2 emissions and, where applicable, for the purposes of vehicle-specific subsidies. Further information on the WLTP and NEDC measurement procedures is also available at www.bmw.de/wltp.
For further details of the official fuel consumption figures and official specific CO2 emissions of new cars, please refer to the “Manual on the fuel consumption, CO2 emissions and power consumption of new cars”, available at sales outlets free of charge, from Deutsche Automobil Treuhand GmbH (DAT), Hellmuth-Hirth-Str. 1, 73760 Ostfildern-Scharnhausen and at https://www.dat.de/co2/