Digital Marketing drifting towards Virtual and Augmented Reality?

How is Digital Marketing going to behave in the Virtual and Augmented Reality trends?By: ECHEVESTE Mauricio, SAPIEN Michelle, ACEVEDO José

Since the last decade Digital Marketing has seen a massive uproar with sponsored images, videos and messages. However its competitive nature has created a new problem to advertisers that is diminishing their ROI, this caused an opening for new technologies to step in and try to deliver the same message in a much creative and succesful way.

Since the normal user is starting to develop a hate-relationship with digital ads, causing an increase in the adblocker presence for digital adverts. From 2015 to 2016 the usage of adblockers increased in a whooping 30% setting the final number of people not seeing ads around 615 million. And the trend of adblockers just keeps growing, meaning that the more time passes the less people see your ads.

Who would invest in AR and VR?

Well this question is answered easily since Coca-Cola kicked a new AR campaign with Aliplay to celebrate chinese new year. But Coca-cola isn't the only one taking a bite other big companies are starting to experiment with this technology, like Nivea, Volkswagen and Starbucks, however the efficiency of this campaigns is debateable.

In a note from Forbes: "Global augmented reality advertising spend tells a different story, however. These figures show an almost 100% jump in spending [...]  When we look at projected trends for both AR and VR technologies combined between 2016 and 2020, the figure skyrockets to a potential $215 billion in 2021 if adoption rates are high."

If we need a clear example of a success story with AR we only need to look into the AR game Pokemon Go, its success led to major partnerships with big brands such as Mc Donalds.

We are left to talk about VR in digital marketing so lets take a look at Audi and Porsche, who took up the task to create VR showrooms experiences where clients can see the car, and its interiors in a customizable way, they can alter interior configurations till they find the best for them. This generates and added value into the whole costumer experience.

Both AR and VR are in their infancy, with so much potential in them its still unclear how far they can go, but if enterprises like Microsoft, Apple and Google are taking an interest in this technology we can safely say that it has a shiny looking future.