VR and AR benefits both brands and their customers

By Adam Wakefield

AR and VR was the focus for the ninth South African edition of Online Tuesday, hosted at the Radisson Blue Gautrain Hotel in Johannesburg, on Tuesday, 18 October. It was the second time the event had come to South Africa’s largest city.

The four speakers for the evening were clicks2customers digital marketing consultant, Johan Walters, Lucan managing director, Werner Uys, Google SA industry head, Bryan Nelson, and Google SA head of agencies, Lorraine Landon.

It was Walters who began, noting the known AR landscape includes search, display, and mobile marketing. A new element in this mix is visual marketing.

“As marketers, we tend to test new things in isolation and that is a no-go. Always test a new channel with other channels, if you apply marketing best practise and measurement. All these channels work together,” Walters said.

As a brand or marketer, you need to map out all the consumer touch points, from the non-digital such as print ads, billboards and television, to digital. From there, the decision lies in which channels you choose to integrate, where and under what circumstances.

After these decisions are made and a campaign with AR is initiated, there is a range of possibilities by which AR interactions can be measured, such as, interaction time, social shares, and heat maps where users blipped, all providing useful insights and data.

If a brand or marketer is to use AR, Walters recommended thinking about a series of factors.

“Align your AR strategy to overall business goals. What’s the customer outcome? What do you want the customer to think or do differently beyond the campaign?” he said.

“Delivery beyond the novelty. Deliver value. Create brand experiences because you can track that interaction you have with the brand. The customer journey has not changed. Where will consumers be more receptive to the AR campaign?”

Content is king, and must be designed for maximum engagement. The experience should be optimised for local bandwidth, with awareness and activation proving key parts for every AR campaign.

“Don’t be put off by demographics. There are some campaign examples for senior citizens. It’s anyone with a smart phone,” Walters said.

“AR campaigns convert the brands existing user base. High quality campaigns can drive more user interactions. The real power of AR is when you introduce it into a multi-channel mix and add measurement. Establish clear KPIs of what you want to measure your campaign against.”

After Walters, Uys addressed the room about VR. He noted how Lucan had received lots of questions about VR, with 360 video and computer generated (CG) VR lumped together.

While they are different, structurally, they are non-responsive experiences where the user is taken on a journey with a beginning and end point. What really excites Uys is responsive VR, where the end user determines the path they take. The technology is gradually becoming more accessible, and at this point, only the surface is being scraped.

In terms of best practise, Uys pointed to four factors, being production workflow, resolution quality, cost, and cinematic language.

“In South Africa, we always complain about budget and that we don’t have the resources. There is no excuse. It is our responsibility to tell the brand that they need to push it [VR],” he said.

However, VR cannot be forced. Instead, Uys recommended seeing where VR fits in with the macro-vision of what you want to achieve, and if VR, or AR for that matter, can form a part of the macro-vision, go for it.

“If you don’t have the idea, if you don’t have the content, don’t force it,” Uys cautioned, wrapping up.

Following him was Nelson and Landon, who spoke about how improving artificial intelligence (AI), opens up a world of possibilities for the application of AR and VR.

From Google’s perspective, Landon said AI is taking information and products that the end user interacts with, and makes them more useful.

Quoting Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, she said, “In the long run, we’re evolving in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world.”

Nelson said it is taken for granted how “amazing” some of technologies people interact with are today.

“In the pre-Internet world, we all aspired to the Star Trek computer, where you can talk to the computer and it responds in a natural way. You probably don’t realise it. You have the Star Trek computer in your phone, in your car,” he said.

“These devices are here today and, in fact, you have interacted with the Star Trek computer.”
Landon and Nelson proceeded to do demonstrations illustrating the leaps AI has taken, such as asking Google search, through voice recognition, to find different pictures according to the description given.

The pictures were found, and not because they were indexed to match their question. Rather, the search engine was analysing the pictures themselves to see if they matched the search question. It was “looking” at the pictures themselves.

“Every single thing I’ve just shown you has now been made available as APIs for you to use. You can build products that use all the features of machine learning to create your own products and the question is, what are you going to use with this kind of power?” Nelson said.

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