It's neither apathy nor hubris. Marketing companies can engage in iterative marketing when they have their feet planted in a market. Virtual worlds had no existing foundation.

Unfortunately the one thing they can't market is inexperience, so for the first wave of marketers would be reluctant to sell this plan to their clients: "ok let's do some stuff that might work, that's phase 1... then later we'll do it all again when we know what was successful and what failed." Instead they sold: "we know what we're doing" and took investor cash to figure out what actually worked.

They may have _tried_ to build iterative marketing into the mix, but any sensible client would figure, if it hadn't been done before, then it was a high risk proposition... better to wait till these metaverse development companies had burned their competitors cash on their learning process and come back later with a higher chance of a successful campaign.

Well that's my two cents.. does it make sense? I think that's what happened... oh that, apathy and hubris :P