In the digital age customers are continuously bombarded with ads. This has led to customers purposely ignoring them reducing their efficacy. How can marketers then connect with their target audience? The answer is simple, to not just display ads to the customers but make them a part of it. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are a couple of ways to do so. Digital assets are either superimposed on top of the real world as in augmented reality or create a completely exclusive virtual world as in VR.
These engaging and immersive experiences not only deliver the brand message but build a strong positive bond with their target audience. They have become mainstream and have numerous benefits to leveraging them in advertising.
1. Deeper engagement with customers - as the attention span of people is on the decline, brands are forced to think of creative ways to advertise. AR/VR campaigns immerse the customer into the brand's world increasing the time spent by the customer with the brand.
2. More convincing - While traditional ads are considered intrusive and are being ignored, AR/VR are considered as storytelling mediums and have higher convincing power. Making it ideal for e-commerce brands to sell their products online since studies suggest that AR experiences boost impulse buys and online shopping in general.
3. Better data driven insights - Since the customers will be spending more time experiencing the AR/VR campaigns it will be easier for brands to not just collect customer data but gain insights into their target audience’s preferences. They can study their behaviour and customise their campaigns based on those insights for optimal results. These insights help brands build better personalised experiences.
4. AR/VR powered by AI - while AR/VR themselves are powerful advertising tools, their implementation with AI has led to improved performance of ads and data analysis. Computer vision and machine learning has enabled marketers to automate email marketing, social media campaigns, and content creation but also study facial expressions, emotional response, sentiment analysis and attention of the customer to brand products. Computer vision and machine learning can enable gesture-based control and feedback. Leading to the creation of personalised and adaptive AR/VR experiences. AI based plugins such as ConvAI adds human-like conversational capabilities to characters in the virtual worlds. There are attempts made to incorporate edge AI to AR/VR experiences to reduce latency and improve real-time performance.
While there are several advantages to AR and VR experiences within the advertising space a few drawbacks might impede their adoption.
1. Cost - developing AR/VR experiences can be cost-intensive especially for smaller businesses. Limiting the access to these technologies to brands with deeper pockets.
2. Error in perception - While digital assets within the AR/VR experience might help customers become acquainted with the products they will not be exactly the same as the real product and may lead to errors in perception. For example a real estate property in VR might feel very different in real life when the customer is in the actual space.
3. Difficulty in integrating AI into AR/VR experiences - VR experiences especially need to be optimised for performance, keeping in mind the frame rate, latency and resolution. AI computation is resource-intensive and relies on remote cloud servers. This can slow down the AR/VR experiences turning a delightful experience to frustration for the end user. Moreover testing AI models in the AR/VR environment takes additional time and resources to test its effectiveness.
The article has been authored by Tagglabs founder Hariom Seth.
