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Ryan Donnell
Branding enthusiast, geek extraordinaire, and silliness connoisseur

Businesses? Gotta Catch ’Em All

Are you one of the few people not on Pokemon Go?

So you have plenty of people talking about the new future of augmented reality, the future of gaming, or in some cases discovering their cities.

So beside all the crazy positive and some negative side effects of the growth of Pokemon Go, let’s get to some true hard facts. Pokemon Go is obviously suffering a bit of a fad phase and we will see if it holds on, however these are details we cannot ignore.

  1. Pokemon Go has doubled the installs of Tinder on Android phones, installed on 5.16% of phones as of July 8th
  2. Nearing Twitter’s Daily Active Users of around 3.5%.
  3. People are spending twice as much time on Go versus SnapChat (Avg. 43 mins per day!)

All data from SimilarWeb.

Exactly, people look at this data and think it is all a fluke. However, Nintendo and Niantic (the developer) may have tapped something here. No it isn’t about the world’s love for Pokemon. This is about a need for our mobile/online reality to integrate with real reality.

So for marketing and business, where does this come in? Well, we have a very popular platform that currently cannot be ignored. Snapchat has been slow but that is because companies are still grappling with sponsoring (along with Snapchat themselves on selling the platform). Now you have an upstart gaming application that isn’t just a game, it is experiencing the world around you with the phone in your hand.

Businesses are foaming at the mouth to advertise on a platform that people are spending nearly an hour a day on. Nintendo/Niantic, whether it was by accident or on purpose, have plenty of PokeStops and PokeGyms which can easily be sponsored. These are actual places in the game that Niantic through their geocaching data, decided to place in game interaction. Then you have this massive data need, time to sponsor wifi hotspots.

Now, all this talk is about in game advertising, what about what Pokemon Go means for the rest of the world, what is the long term play here? Well geocaching has been around for a while, but really wasn’t able to take off. Reason? There wasn’t enough incentive to participate. However, now there is a game involved and with a massive amount of people playing, there in lies the competition. Gaming companies are really looking hard at what is going on now as they have invested heavily into Virtual Reality rather than Augmented Reality. That could change that industry focus as soon as next year. Google (who used to own Niantic) might be thinking of incorporating more augmented reality in their socially mined GPS app Waze. Each of these are small movements but could change the way we interact in our world. Augmented avertising has been on the sidelines for years now, sounds like Pokemon Go might be the catalyst for change.