The engagement era: how AR & VR will reshape brand & consumer connection
Content marketing is about to explode because of Mixed Reality – a mix of virtual and augmented reality tech. Ahead of his seminar at this Thursday’s Entertainment Marketing Summit, James Towers reveals why marketers need to take note.
Consumer advertising experience actually matters. Who would of thought that constantly bombarding an audience with (mostly) lame advertising and never really giving much care for how engaging it was would wear thin?
Consumers today can avoid a brand’s advances better than they ever have before and their attention is scattered and fleeting.
We as marketers got lazy with the rise of digital and just went for ad placement in front of eyeballs in essentially the same manner we’ve been trying to get in front of consumers for decades, same tactics but on a new medium.
Then came the ‘content marketing’ era where we started to realise we could potentially own the content that consumers wanted to spend their time with. We’ve done okay at that, some better than others, but not all bad.
no-one wanted to engage with brands interactive web ads, no-one wanted to engage with brands on social media, no-one downloaded or used 99% of the branded apps in the app stores. But VR will be different?
Hello Eaon,
If marketers aim to create truly engaging experiences in VR or AR (not just interactive ads) maybe we’ll see the true dawn of engaging advertising experiences. I’m sure we’ll see some shockers too!
Doesn’t answer the question. That intention, from a marketer, can be applicable to all that Eaon mentioned. Question you should ask is whether, we as consumers, want to have brands create VR experiences for us or if we want to use VR/AR for other reasons and will be annoyed every time an advertiser interrupts us. In that case, nothing will change…
James, I think you’re right in terms of MR being a game changer, but 80%-90% of everything people have produced or viewed through a mobile HMD VR device has been 360 video… and we are still just coming to grips with how we tell stories through choose-your-own adventure 360 and VR. Admittedly, Playstation will help educate the customer about what VR (Gaming) can provide as a “new” experience but MR won’t be anywhere near what you expect it to be in the next 2 years. The interesting space for VR is social VR, and I think customer experience in the virtual world will be as amazing as we are allowed to imagine it. And I think if we use the old school ways of pulling adds in VR, we are going to put a huge amount of people off straight of the bat! But before we have mass market MR adoption, to the scale that you think we all imagine, we’ll need the convergence of true untethered AR (whether that be from Meta, Magic Leap, Google, Facebook or Apple) and a reasonable level of AI only then we’ll have a “game changer” for marketing opportunities in Australia… and that’s not going to be before 2020. PS. why did you show a picture of MR through one of those old school Smartphone things?