Virtual and augmented reality advertising
The concept of virtual reality (VR) has been around for quite some time, with much controversy over when the concept was first realized. Nonetheless, real science is slowly catching up with the imaginations of science fiction and lo and behold; VR and AR technologies are now becoming commonplace in consumer society.
With marketers realizing the popularity of consumer VR and AR devices, and the immersive experience they offer, various virtual reality marketing agencies such as Reverge have sprung up to fill this extremely fresh niche. This is as well as mega-brands Coca Cola and McDonalds developing their own VR campaigns, which just goes to show there is a rising demand for these types of specialist marketing services.
Marketers have also been thinking up novel uses for VR technology such as real estate agents offering virtual house tours, VR rollercoasters featuring deep space battles, and greater immersion in online gaming.
Back in 2014, high street brands Topshop and John Lewis were already experimenting with VR in their marketing, with Topshop offering competition winners virtual seats to the London fashion show and John Lewis debuting an interactive story featuring a small boy and his penguin.
So with high street brands finding their feet with virtual reality, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg investing upwards of $2 Billion on the purchase of the Oculus VR, one can imagine we are likely to experience a boom in affordable VR technology. But what can we expect from virtual reality advertising and marketing in the near future?
The deployment of bots replacing human interaction
You may already be aware of bots. For example, you may have seen the likes of Murphy Bot – which answers your what-if question in the form of an image. Or prediction bots – offering high-accuracy sports predictions. Or you may have already spoken to a bot unaware that it wasn’t a human, in the form of a chat bot on an ecommerce website.
For those who aren’t really sure what a bot is, it’s a series of algorithms forming an application that can be programmed to perform automated tasks such as searching the internet or performing actions on request.
Since these systems grow as they learn, and are connected to the internet 24/7, they could potentially be able to let you know when the items you want are on sale, remind you of the events you’re planning to attend, or order pizza for you without you having to even lift a finger.
The marketing benefits for this kind of technology are immense, and with automation becoming a thing of the present, it looks like marketers wouldn’t have to lift a finger either! (That is, until our robot overlords enslave us all).
The proliferation of AI in automated decision making
There have been many advances in the field of AI in recent years, with features in your life you wouldn’t even know are governed by artificial intelligence algorithms.
The autocorrect feature on your phone for example traces the patterns of your spelling, learns from your previous errors and refines its prediction process based on user input combined with a nifty machine learning algorithm.
AI is another science fantasy coming to life, yet how is it currently being integrated into today’s marketing efforts?
Well for one, Google has made extremely progressive advances in machine learning and cognitive processing that has been successfully introducing these functions into their products and services for a while now. With AI prevalent in indexing websites, reverse image search and YouTube recommendations. It has even been integrated into their ad network.
IBM are also experiencing success with their flagship AI – Watson, who recently composed a song. Like Google, IBM have given the public access to the Watson Developer Cloud (their API) which means developers can now start to produce apps and services for a variety of marketing purposes – all featuring AI.
As for the future of artificial intelligence, we’ll let you ponder that one.
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