The Future Of Monetization Isn’t What It Used To Be
It’s (thankfully) not often that a famous football player is accused of a double homicide that leads the LAPD in a slow-speed chase on national television, inadvertently scoring the Ford Bronco the most memorable unpaid visibility of all time. A lot has changed since the 90’s, and, as our world becomes increasingly digital and interconnected, the way we consume media and retain information also continues to evolve. As it stands, we’ve adjusted to the inundation of digital marketing via mental tunnel vision and by employing applications to block ads for us. Anyone who has ever searched for a product online is familiar with what can be summed up as being stalked around the web; in my particular case, because I visited jewelry designer Pamela Love’s website some time this past month, Pamela Love product ads “follow” me to any site privy to my browsing history. Whatever annoyance I felt was negligible, until I was forced to look at ads for $450 jewelry alongside an article on the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. Pamela Love’s marketing team isn’t to blame; it’s the fault of an algorithm that doesn’t discriminate product from content. However, experiencing that cognitive dissonance means I now have a negative association with Pamela Love’s products. These digital marketing methods are very much embedded in the online ad culture and will continue to be a means of distributing sponsored content. Still, I would argue that to further perpetuate these marketing habits will only exacerbate the public’s growing distaste towards sponsored brand presence and encourage the use ad blockers.
Where retargeting is an example of informed but non-contextual digital marketing, ads built around a story represent the other end of the marketing spectrum. Major labels commission reputable ad agencies that know how to frame their brand in a relevant narrative. But smaller companies that don’t have that luxury still know that a strong story — a reason why for the product — resonates. In 2014, toy startup Goldieblox produced an ad that won a four-million dollar Super Bowl spot. That Goldiblox ad then went viral, resulting in sales that have increased 7000% since. People voluntarily view and share ads that embed the product inside of a quality story, and the positive emotional footprint casts the brand in a favorable light, which encourages spending. When we look towards the future, the evolution of programmatic advertising in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) calls for us to set a precedent for advertising practices that resist problematic 2D digital marketing methods. Designing an unskippable ad in VR and AR means matching an immersive platform with narratively immersive sponsored content.
Ideally, sponsored content is woven into a narrative that can be assimilated into the plot. We’re not going to walk out on the Ant-Man movie because a short and comedic sequence features our protagonist working at Baskin Robbins. Though Paul Rudd’s infinite charisma certainly helped, the feature was well received by fans and generated Baskin Robbins 64.9MM views and $6.5MM media value in return on investment. The advertisement is obvious, but, by making the brands part of a narrative, viewers don’t necessarily process those brands as ads: they create an experience. Delivering sponsored content through a narrative respects the viewer’s time because it doesn’t prevent him from enjoying the content he intended to consume. When well executed, it also respects the viewer’s intellect, as he can and will recognize a brand’s presence.
Whatever you may think of the Kardashians, the Kardashian-Jenner empire has a masterful command of marketing across a multitude of platforms; Kim Kardashian: Hollywood became a massive hit mobile game when it launched in 2014, and, according to a 2016 report by Glu Mobile — the game’s developer — Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has been downloaded 42 million times, and has been played for 3.3 billion sessions. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, via partnerships with various fashion and beauty retailers, allows players to purchase and dress their avatars in limited editions items favored by Kim Kardashian.
One of the more successful integrations in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood had renowned fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld join the game as a character with a special storyline and a virtual boutique that sold in-game ready-to-wear items. This promotion was timed to match the launch of Lagerfeld’s e-commerce site, allowing players to visit the site a day early. By the end of the month, 2.5MM players had visited Karl.com. Though the nature of the game lends itself to a more seamless integration of brands and designers — Olivier Rousteing, Judith Leiber, and Nars, to name a few — the game also comes with a community of players who have a vested interest in Kim Kardashian’s world.
When sponsored content can’t seamlessly coexist in a game’s plot or setting, adopting a self-aware and comedic edge can produce a similarly favorable response. Final Fantasy XV, with day one shipment and digital sales exceeding five million units, is an example of a higher fidelity game that embraced sponsored content. The success and endurance of the Final Fantasy franchise owes itself, in part, to the rich and immersive fantasy worlds the characters inhabit. Despite its fantasy driven narrative, FFXV managed to incorporate several product placements into their game, some of which were better received than others. A particularly inspired bit of marketing involved the Nissin Cup Noodle. Fans were captivated and engaged, generating fan art, blog posts, community conversations, and YouTube videos, all about Nissin Cup Noodle.
The Nissin Cup Noodle placement was unique because it was part of playable quest. A quest is a series of tasks, guided by a storyline that the player can complete in exchange for a reward. In the story crafted for Nissin Cup Noodle, the player’s companion is an instant ramen superfan, and, to make him happy and thus receive a bonus reward, the Player needs to acquire the Nissin Cup Noodle. The quest takes you on a journey to hunt down your companion’s favorite ramen ingredients to cook and enjoy with your teammates. Engaging in the quest also rewards the Player with a scene that is only attainable through the quest’s successful completion. Is a branded instant ramen quest out of place in a fantasy world? Sure. Dedicating an entire quest to Nissin Cup Noodles lampshaded its absurdity; it had a sense of humor about itself, and it played into a character’s established narrative.
So which product placement was poorly received in FFXV? The American Express logo lazily stickered onto a store window didn’t endear itself to fans. The choice of product placement was viewed as world-breaking. The placement’s greatest sin was not that it was a blatant advertisement, but that it disrupted the fantasy and didn’t serve a narrative purpose. The American Express brand won’t suffer for it, but players vacillated between irritation and apathy, creating no engagement and setting a negative precedent for future use of sponsored content.
While brands and marketers will continue to experiment with ways to be memorable and unskippable at scale within existing mediums, I am most intrigued by the possibilities of storytelling in virtual reality (VR), an industry that received a record breaking $1.8B in funding in 2016. VR is still in its nascent stages, but it’s a medium that has the potential to tell stories in ways that can leave people with lasting emotional footprints. As is the case with any form of technology, there will be those who wish to exploit it. This is why it is important for those pioneering the technology behind VR to aim for quality in their approach, protecting this new ecosystem, so that it can thrive and achieve long-term success. For now, most of the VR content accessible to the general public comes in the form of 360-degree films and video games. But VR won’t be exclusive to video games, nor will VR be platform specific, because, as VR technology evolves it will be ubiquitous, spreading to ever corner of the web through WebVR (3D web browsing). With that said, VR is the future evolution of programmatic advertising, and it is in our best interest to get it right.
Those who wish to bring branded content to virtual reality should take lessons learned from existing marketing habits by adopting the best practices with sensitivity to fit VR. I believe sponsored content can be done in VR, at scale, and with a level of quality never before seen in other digital mediums. Ideally, the presence of sponsored content in VR shouldn’t disrupt your enjoyment of the content with which you’ve chosen to engage. Ads are ubiquitous in our physical world and digital world, and many of us have conditioned ourselves to ignore them. VR has the potential to be many things, but VR itself comes with an inherent expectation of full immersion; we want to respect an individual’s virtual space and experience, or we risk her taking off her headset and rejecting the medium all together. Easier said than done, right? Let’s break down how this might work out.
Consumers value transparency, so this example involves obvious product placement. By using intelligent targeting to approximate what you like, a 3D representation of the brand will be present in your VR experience. If you’re interested in what you see, you can activate the content by “shaking” or “picking up” the object, which could teleport you to a new branded world — think Disney Land, but virtual — or, as a trigger to initiate branded playable content (a quest, mini game, etc.). I want to emphasize that Users have the agency to choose whether or not they want to engage with the sponsored content. And, because VR is a data environment, analytics collected from this medium is of the highest precise quality, which will allow us to understand what you prefer and what annoys you so that it won’t be served to you again in the future. Interaction types are customizable by the marketer. Follow-through is also customizable by the marketer. As for doing this at scale, digital shelf space is unlimited and personalizing content to individual users will not cost you anything. Of course, the success here relies on brands and marketers to create engaging and captivating storylines and worlds; but the end result leaves a positive emotional footprint. Because VR is a sensorial experience that 2D mediums cannot give, it’s also a lasting impression, akin to the memories we make from personal experiences.
Social media platforms have allowed us to curate our lives to fit the story we want to tell, and, by the same token, we hit “follow” for the stories we want to consume. We love a good story, and we hate having our time wasted by an aimless tangent. If there’s a narrative diversion from point A to point B, point Z needs to enrich the path to point B. People want to discover new things, but they hate being subjected to what they find irrelevant, or worse, offensive. The ways in which we communicate narratives — oral storytelling, ink, online publishing — change and evolve, but the power of storytelling transcends time. When we look to the future, VR is the next shiny new thing. It’s also a thing that has the capacity to maximize emotional footprints in a way that 2D experiences cannot; every frustration felt when confronting unwanted ads will be amplified. Digital browsing should be more sophisticated over time, yet we ostensibly expend mental energy ignoring retargeted ads or we spend time and money to find effective ad blockers. Unless we want VR micro-aggressions to feel like a literal assault on our senses and invasion of our personal space, we cannot apply 2D online ads in VR. Micro-aggressions in VR would make for a fantastic Black Mirror episode (“15 Million Merits” has an example of this nightmare), but I don’t think we want them to be an actual reality.
I want us to come together as an industry to design ads that are fitting for virtual and augmented environments, without 2D cross-medium contamination. Our adventures in 2D ad navigation have taught us what not to replicate. Setting a standard in VR won’t be easy, but putting the work in now means we won’t have to fix problems later. VR intrigues me. I translated my love for video games into a career as a monetization game designer — my job is to design for delighting people, and with that experience, I know storytelling is key for monetization (and key to figuring out how monetization works in the VR industry). VR advertising is a marketing proposition that delivers results to brands and marketers because it entertains the user. With a breadth of possibilities in VR, lazy content is unforgivable. Marrying sponsored content with mindful narratives can combat ad fraud and cut down on the need for ad blocking, and, with virtual reality, there’s a whole new scope of storytelling ideas to realize.
