Big AR: Augmented Reality and Marketing
This is the third article within a series of blog posts on augmented reality and the future of marketing. If you missed out on the first two Big AR posts, you can read them here and here.
In this round of Big AR, we will discuss the implications for marketing within an augmented reality world. We will touch on several different processes that may change and transform in a world of abundant augmented reality.
The Planes of Realism
In a recent AR Kit video made by iOS development team Nedd, we see the future implications of our reality within AR. Panels and doorways can open up within our own world, creating a blend between real reality and augmented reality. Implementing platforms like these doorways can create new ways for marketers to tell their stories to the end user within their own world. Imagine you’re shopping at a mall, you step into a shoe store, and although they don’t have a specific model in stock, you can enter a room or section with panels of products that are rotatable, augmentable, moveable, and you can see how the out-of-stock products look on your feet and order them to ship to your house right there.
This technology can transform entire industries: theme parks can become even more magical — brands can market their products through immersive experiences, imagine a Harry Potter augmented experience of Diagon Alley or a Super Mario World theme park with actual goombas and koopas running around!
The App Store of Tomorrow
The future of the app market will not be aligned with a rectangular screen. It will be an actual market. Before your eyes, you will be able to immerse yourself with marketing material on games, productivity apps, and utilities that do not only work as information in/out software confined to your phone. This software will be able to analyze your environment, recognize what you need and when you need it with artificial intelligence, and it will be able to proactively organize your life whilst working in it’s specific app function so you don’t have to worry about it.
The future is a little bit easier (albeit, a little more intrusive — more on that in another post) and if your future is easy, the app store has to be easy too. Simplified processes within a futuristic app store can focus on voice-first, allowing you to discuss what you need in natural language, allowing you to skip the search bar. Other options of a futuristic app store allow for marketers to create clippable product pages that users can pull out of the store and throw into a book or within their room for later reference. This will allow the mixing of real and artifical property — physical and digital paper and objects will allow marketers to create immersive materials for users to pull apart and incorporate into their daily spaces without even having to step into a physical store!
Ads in Your World
Advertisements can be obtrusive, especially when they display information not specifically relevant to the user. Advertisements have, of course, advanced over the years to target specific segments of a population that match the relevant demographic a marketer is looking to sell to. This will continue to narrow down as we work more artificial intelligence into marketing algorithms.
In a glasses AR future, this will head toward specifically targeting the customer’s needs and their personal lifestyles. Advertisements will have to be creative to fit within our world without causing vexation to the end user. Marketers can use advertising overlaid on the user’s world to highlight specific places and how their product may be relevant, or to provide users with a relevant product that matches the one they are shopping for. As long as we maintain minimalism and purpose-focus in AR interface design, we can hopefully avoid the bombardment that is obtrusive advertising. And hopefully it won’t get as bombarding as the following video.
The Marketing Voice
The 2025–2030 future of refined augmented reality on glasses will be a future we will either enjoy or resent. If it is anything like the Hyper-Reality video above, it will be intrusive, overwhelming, and scary. We can make sure that doesn’t happen.
The biggest thing marketers can do to ensure that we have a positive and empowering future with AR is to continue telling our stories, developing our marketing voice, and ultimately, maintain our integrity and relationship with our clients. The most important thing to remember in terms of marketing and AR is that, we will continue to have more potential to expose our product to the consumer — their restrictive screens will open up and slowly, but surely, it will be their entire lives that are portrayed back to us.
We must remember that we are not only marketers: we are consumers ourselves. This future affects us. We must continue to treat our relationships as treasured conversations, as opportunities to tell dynamic and transformative stories, and not just as a transaction.
