Virtual Reality Is the Real Thing
for Marketers
Catharine P.
Taylor has covered digital media since 1994, writing for publications
including Adweek and Advertising Age. She also
wrote the weekly Social Media Insider column for MediaPost for seven years, and
is a program director for the Conference Board, managing some of its
marketing-focused events.
For as long as there has
been marketing, those who practice it have been on the hunt for the next big
thing — loosely defined as that medium or platform so engaging that consumers
are inexorably drawn to it. Among the contenders in 2016? Virtual reality. At
March’s SXSW Interactive Festival, which devoted an entire track to virtual reality (VR) and its sibling, augmented reality
(which combines the virtual and physical worlds), attendees could take part in
a Google VR Happy Hour, “paint”
a virtual McDonald’s Happy Meal box, or
travel into space with NASA.
In April 2016, at Facebook’s annual F8 Developers
Conference, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg closed
his keynote address not only by pinning big hopes on VR —
one of the key components of the social network’s 10-year plan — but by giving
a US$100 Gear VR headset and a Samsung Galaxy smartphone to every one of the
2,600 attendees. Rather than being just the usual Silicon Valley swag, this was
swag with a purpose. Facebook (which
bought VR company Oculus Rift in
2014 for $2 billion) was giving the developer community, which includes plenty
of people in marketing, technology that can create the kind of immersive
branding experiences that will engage potential customers and perhaps coax them
into real-world transactions.
It’s way too early to say precisely how the promise of VR will be
actualized across the entire advertising landscape — particularly when the
hardware that produces these virtual experiences is expensive, unwieldy, and
has the extra drawback of making its users look downright laughable, almost as
though they had strapped a shoebox to their heads. With the exception of a VR
player known as the Google Cardboard, they range in price from $100 to $800,
and even those high prices are misleading. The reason Facebook gave developers
the Samsung Galaxy, which can sell for around $700, is that it’s basically a
component of the Gear VR. Users have to put the phone in a special holder at
the front of their headset in order to experience virtual reality.
But even the $15 Cardboard
— a specialized cardboard box that also requires
a smartphone to work — demonstrates why
advertisers are lining up to create immersive virtual reality experiences.
The New York Timesdistributed the device for free in partnership
with Google to 1 million print subscribers in late 2015. In so doing, it opened
an easily accessible window into what VR can be for both content companies and
marketers.
Through
the NYT
VR channel, viewers can (virtually) stand alongside
mourners in Paris after the terrorist attacks, attend a
presidential campaign event in Iowa, or visit a refugee camp in South Sudan
during a food drop. Content is added to the channel as it becomes available,
and stays there. NYT VR also has paying advertisers; TAG Heuer, Mini, and
General Electric have been among them. The “ads,” naturally, are short VR
films, that appear as part of a menu of content (differentiated from editorial
content). The fees advertisers are paying for the opportunity have not been
disclosed. Unlike the editorial material, ad content is pulled from the channel
when the flight (air time) paid for is over, according to a New York
Times spokesperson.
The TAG Heuer experience has users appear to drive a race car and
float through the gears of a well-engineered watch. Mini’s recent offering was
a short film about a diamond heist that leverages the medium’s ability to
stream video in 360 degrees — viewers have to turn almost entirely around in
order to see a fight that is a major part of the film’s plot. At another point,
viewers appear to be sitting in the back seat of a Mini Cooper during the
getaway scene.
The breadth and depth of brands that are experimenting with the
technology, either behind or in front of the camera, demonstrates how fervently
advertisers want to be in on VR. In addition to the brands already mentioned,
they include Mattel (which is recrafting the ViewMaster for the modern era),
Apple, Microsoft, Nestlé, The North Face, Lufthansa, Hasbro, Disney, NBC,
Coca-Cola, Nissan, and HBO — and the list goes on.
Toward the end of his F8 keynote, Zuckerberg posted a huge slide
of the VR glasses of the future. Looking no different from regular glasses,
their development may be the final signpost that, for content providers and
marketers, VR has arrived. Still, even if such technological refinement is
years off, it looks like the time to start experimenting with VR is now.
Catharine P. Taylor
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Virtual-Reality-Is-the-Real-Thing-for-Marketers
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