• by Todd Wasserman , Staff Writer, July 11, 2022

Facebook picked a tough year to pull off its brand reinvention.

In late 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was changing its name to Meta. “I’ve been thinking a lot about our identity” Zuckerberg said, speaking at a virtual event in November. “Over time, I hope we’re seen as a metaverse company.”

In February, Meta rolled out a Super Bowl ad showing Facebook being metaphorically resurrected in the metaverse.  The company appeared to be on a trajectory toward creating the metaverse.

But then the economy went south. In early June, Zuckerberg told employees the company was slashing its employee-hiring target this year by 30%, according to The Wall Street Journal. He called the current economic environment “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.”

Even before that, Facebook, er, Meta, was also grappling with changes to Apple’s iOS platform that let users opt out of Facebook’s tracking technologies.

Yet Meta is still going full-bore on its reinvention. Just this week, it stopped requiring VR headset users to log on with Facebook accounts. Meta accounts, meanwhile, are set to make their debut in August. Zuckerberg said he envisions 1 billion users spending hundreds of dollars each in the metaverse by the second half of the 2020s.

In 2021, that was already a substantial bet. Now, with the U.S. close to a recession, that vision seems somewhat further away.