How VR could change advertising forever
When I say ‘advertising’, what is the first word that comes to your mind? Did you get anything along the lines of annoying, intrusive, disruptive?
Unless you work in the industry, you probably did. By definition, today, advertisers have to disrupt because they can’t get your attention any other way.
Whether on a newspaper, TV or the web, advertisers compete for real estate against the content they advertise into. They are limited by the geometry of the canvas they can tell their stories onto — cover page, side column, commercial break, pop up ads.
As a consumer, your attention is on the content, so advertisers are forced to be disrupt it, to direct it towards their ads.
Publishers need to figure out the threshold that irreversibly annoys their users and serve ads to be just under that. I call that the ‘annoyance threshold’. Pissing them off is not a concern as long as they’re under that. The good news for them is that annoyance threshold stands very high — we have gotten used to gaze past ads in a newspaper, change channel when TV ads come on, or closing a few popups.
Is it always going to be like that?
For the first time, there is an opportunity for change, in the name of VR and AR. VR and AR fundamentally change the storytelling paradigm. There is no boundary between you and the content. No paper in your hands, no TV, no laptop screen. Content is your new reality.
Nothing should remind the user that what he sees is not real.
As a result, dispruptive ads in immersive technologies would be a disaster. They would fundamentally damage the experience and kill the immersion. You’d lose on the action. You’d remember that it was only a simulation. You wouldn’t be just annoyed but feeling robed of your experience. Our ‘annoyance threshold’ in immersive technologies is much, much lower than in any media currently available. The slightest reminder that this isn’t real would just trigger it and kill the experience.
As a result, disruption doesn’t have its place in immersive world. I’m talking to advertisers and publishers in particular — the same disruption that was dictated for hundreds of years by the geometry of the canvas supporting information — it’s not going to work.
As an industry, we can’t afford to f*** up our newcomers first experience with disruptive ads. Especially in this early stage. We need to grow the industry with every new user we can get. We need great content.
If we don’t strive to improve that, and follow the same principle we’ve applied in our history of advertising, we will eventually kill the industry because it is not mature enough to survive only on the early adopters.
And VR publishers will try to over monetize like they’ve done everywhere else — in particular the web.
They know people are going to hate it, but they fail to realise one thing. Online, people need to check the news or buy things, so they’re willing to fight through disruption to achieve their goals. But people don’t need VR and AR yet. It’s not delivering real value to them — they just want to have a good time. Their annoyance threshold is much lower and if the experience is not up to their expectation they just won’t bother. Worse, they could become a negative advocate for the industry and discourage their network to give it a try.
We can’t afford that. Doesn’t matter if the industry is still hot — billions from investors and big companies won’t save it if immersive technologies don’t reach a product market fit. We need people to love VR. So, we can’t pretend using the same ways to monetize them.
I’m not taking a stab at anyone, because the industry is so new that there aren’t that many players yet. I am just warning the industry of what is to come if we blindly try to monetize our VR and AR audience the same way we’ve been doing it for years on the web and elsewhere.
The good news is that, while lowering our annoyance threshold, immersive technologies also bring advertisers a massive opportunity to do things differently. For the first time in history, storytellers are not confined to a rectangle to tell stories anymore: they can immerse the user in their message or use the environment as a support for their brand.
Despite obvious challenges, I believe it also creates tremendous opportunities for brands. Instead of focussing purely on metrics like number of clicks or viewability, we’ll regain a focus on creativity and user experience.
Which is what advertising should be about.
