Is Pokémon Go the catalyst for Augmented Reality marketing?

You might have seen the recent hype across your social media channels around Pokémon Go, a game which blends physically walking around in the real world to explore the virtual game world in which Pokémon are in hiding for you to discover and collect. What’s unique about the game is its use of augmented reality to display the Pokémon characters in your real world setting.

Augmented reality (AR) is not a new technology, but such mainstream adoption of it is new with Snapchat (whose ‘filter’ features rely on AR and facial recognition) being the fastest growing social network and now Pokémon Go becoming the top downloaded mobile app on its release. This is down to the number of people across the world now owning smart phones with cameras and powerful enough to deliver a good enough experience for the user which also puts it on the radar of marketers.

Whether people know what they are seeing is AR when using Pokémon go is irrelevant but becoming acclimatised with the experience is what has sparked the interest of marketers and ad agencies. Becoming much more familiar with the action of pointing a device’s camera at something tangible to get a digital reaction opens up huge potential for marketing and product design teams of physical products to bridge the gap between digital and real world experiences for their customers.

AR also has the potential to rescue industries such as print and display advertising, areas of marketing seemingly doomed by the digitalisation of everything, with the ability to not only allow an audience to interact but also for marketers to collect vital data.

Pokémon Go might just have a wider impact than you first thought.