The Khronos Group: Launching the Metaverse Standards Forum
“We thought we were onto something, but when we launched, the response was, well, astounding!”
-Neil Trevett, President, The Khronos Group
The Client
In June 2022, The Khronos Group, launched a novel, independent organization to foster cooperation among metaverse technology stakeholders. To make meaningful progress towards and open and interoperable metaverse, the new Metaverse Standards Foundation needed to launch with significant buy-in from leading companies and standards development organizations; establish its identity and role; and capture the attention of the media and prospective members alike.
Caster spent nine months laying thought leadership groundwork for the Forum in advance of launch. Khronos used each of these media building blocks to strengthen its relationship with other companies and organizations working towards interoperability. Momentum built, with key industry voices joining the nascent Forum as founding members. When the time to go public came, the response was immediate and nearly overwhelming: a flood of media attention and new member interest that was beyond Khronos’s wildest expectations. Within days, the launch of the Metaverse Standards Forum garnered hundreds of unique stories, social shares, and new member applications.
The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 200 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration, metaverse and machine learning. Khronos activities include Vulkan®, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, SPIR-V™, OpenCL™, SYCL™, OpenVX™, NNEF™, OpenXR™, 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, and glTF™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
The Challenge
After Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021, Khronos’s members pushed the organization to build a way for all the Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and companies working on metaverse technologies to cooperate.
Nine months later, Khronos launched the Metaverse Standards Forum. This launch required coordination across 35+ founding member organizations, including several of the biggest companies in the world, such as Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Epic, and Unity, as well as many of the SDOs working on metaverse. Caster was charged with coordinating media outreach across all founding members, including securing quotes and buy-in for the initial press release. Caster also advised the Khronos Group on timing, balancing the need to wait until Forum had enough support from top-tier industry players to stake a legitimate claim against the risk that the news would leak before Khronos was ready.
Khronos was the driving force behind the creation of the Forum, and serves as both its host and a principal member. This high-profile launch was likely to push the organization, a long-time behind-the-scenes force in gaming, web, graphics, 3D, and XR, onto center stage. Khronos needed to capitalize on the opportunity to position itself as a mainstream source of industry thought leadership. At the same time, the Metaverse Standards Forum needed a distinct identity as a wholly independent entity not controlled by any one company.
“This high-profile launch was likely to push the organization, a long-time behind-the-scenes force in gaming, graphics, and XR, onto center stage.”
The Strategy
The launch of the Metaverse Standards Forum was a long-burning fuse leading to a massive bang. As Khronos began reaching out to other SDOs and companies about the creation of the forum, Caster dove deep into media research, expanding metaverse and mainstream business media contacts, reaching out to established relationships with XR media, and developing new thought leadership storylines.
In 2021, before the Forum was even a fully developed idea, Caster began organizing joint media and content opportunities with prospective Metaverse Standards Forum members, including panel presentations and co-authored blog posts with the Academy Software Foundation, the Worldwide Web Consortium, Open AR Cloud, the Open Geospatial Council, Adobe, Autodesk, Wayfair, and Ikea – all of whom ultimately became founders of the Forum.
As the Forum took shape, Caster worked to build an asset-rich press kit and consulted on a brand identity that would support a high-profile launch. As the ranks of founding members swelled, Caster forestalled leaks by holding embargo briefings with the press most tuned in to the metaverse rumor mill, including Axios, Wired, The New Stack, and Immersive Wire. We also secured advance placements for stories about the Metaverse Standards Forum in VentureBeat and on the Voices of VR podcast, guaranteeing a long tail of coverage.
“Caster began organizing joint media and content opportunities with prospective Metaverse Standards Forum Members … all of whom ultimately became founders.”
Results
The Metaverse Standards Forum launched on June 21, 2022. By June 24, the announcement had garnered 270 stories, including top tier coverage from The Economist, Financial Times, Venturebeat, The Verge, The Information, Digital Trends, Reuters, PC Gamer, Engadget, and Ars Technica. Media reported the news from a wide variety of angles, deriving dozens of unique perspectives from Caster’s media briefings and press kit. The release spurred a flood of in-bound requests from analysts, media, podcasts and events, establishing new press relationships for Khronos, The Metaverse Standards Foundation, and Caster for future story opportunities.
The industry’s response was as strong as the media’s. In the first 48 hours after release, the Metaverse Standards Forum received 700 new member requests, and the news was shared on Twitter over 300 times. The Forum had launched with a strategic corps of industry stakeholders; within a week, it swelled to an army.
Khronos founded the Metaverse Standards Forum to connect the constellation of standards working towards metaverse interoperability. Through thoughtful strategic groundwork and expert coordination, Caster helped launch the Forum into the stratosphere.
270
unique media stories in the first 60 hours
300+
shares on Twitter in the first 48 hours
700
new membership applications in the first 48 hours