Augmented Reality: your ad makes me want to hurl chunks
The original headline for this story was “Lucy in the sky with De Beers?” — a reference to the final sentence of the story’s first paragraph. Shortly after I first published the story, the news broke that Lucy O’Donnell, the woman who’d inspired the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was dead. It wasn’t me — she had reportedly been suffering from an auto-immune disease. I’ve got nothing against the song or the woman who inspired it so changed my headline to avoid offence, using one of the subheads from later in the story. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s entirely inoffensive and wholly appropriate – alan.
To my great disappointment, ‘augmented reality’ (AR) doesn’t mean a Lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds hallucinatory overlay on the real world. Nor yet will it allow me to reach out with my dataglove and fondle the loins of a lover in another timezone. So far, it seems limited to showing me where the nearest train station is (should I bang my head and forget) and to plastering advertising messages across my field of view. As if there weren’t enough of those already. Lucy in the sky with De Beers, anyone?
Never mind.
Congratulations all the same to the small team at Australian mobile marketing developer Insqribe who have just announced an ‘augmented reality’ platform for the iPhone that allows other iPhone app developers to add AR features to their own apps. That puts them in the forefront of a burgeoning wave of AR apps and platform solutions and I’m always pleased to see an Australian company in the forefront of anything.
Before I explain what this means for us all, please set aside the problem that very few consumers own a phone smart enough to do AR. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up with me and gets an iPhone too. Especially when they hear that it will let them see advertising which isn’t really there!
Here’s how the consumer marketing industry could use a platform like Insqribe’s to being this utopian future to life.
If I understand it correctly, if you’re , say, Sensis and you have (a) the geo data for your YellowPages.com.au advertisers; (b) an image for each advertiser; and (c) and the urge to build or add new coolness to your iPhone app, you now can. Alternatively, if you aspire to be the next Sensis (and we definitely need a next Sensis) you could build your app, add Insqribe’s AR, and then all you have to do is the easy bit about signing up all the small business advertisers. Here’s a sample in action:
I think we’ll see a lot of excitement around AR in the next 12 months, some of which I share (distant lover, have faith, it can’t be much longer). But I hope it proves to be a bigger hit than other forms of location-based mobile marketing. And I worry that you may be overestimating how keen I am to wander the streets holding my iPhone up so I can find vouchers for $2 off a coffee here, 10% off a pair of jeans there. I may not the alone in my lack-of-keenness. Here’s why:
Stop the phone, I want to get off
Viewing the world through an iPhone camera — especially one with 3D ads floating around in it — can be a disorienting experience that can cause motion sickness. Move the phone too fast in a busy spot and refresh rates slow as your phone needs to re-render all those 3D objects overlaying the actual view. Trying to concentrate on a jittery, laggy version of the world on the small screen while the jitter- and lag-free reality is right behind it can throw your inner ear out, much like reading a book in the back of a moving car.
Even with a stomach like a rock, waving your iPhone around in front of you is a dorky way to behave (unless you’re a flashmob camera operator or starring in an iTunes ad.) Navigating while holding your iPhone at a cooler altitude (yes, it’s hip to keep it at hip level) may mean you’re more likely to bump into a street sign than a bargain. You may also be limited to advertising offers on the floors below you at the mall.
Kids may be better at this walking-without-looking-ahead than me, since they are already well-practised at shuffling slowly ahead while staring at their shoes through a veil of carefully-flopped emo hair.
But associating brands with nausea is not the biggest problem. I’m not at all convinced marketers and consumers actually want AR advertising.
I demand to see the demand
When I work with advertising sales teams, I never fail to marvel at their ability to come up with ideas for new kinds of advertising inventory. I thank them and remind them that they are here to sell what’s already in the inventory. But nobody wants to sell what’s already on the shelf — that’s too hard. It’s much more fun to come up with new kinds of ad. We may be seeing a little of that with AR already. Thanks, but when advertisers are worried they won’t be able to buy enough AR inventory in five years’ time, I’ll come running to you. I may be too late to capitalise on it, but at least I won’t be so early I’ve over-capitalised on it.
Then there’s us, the poor ad-fatigued consumer. Technologists and marketers have always over-estimated how interested consumers are in their advertising. Why else would they show us the same television commercial, once every ad break, throughout an entire season of Rugby Union or cricket? Reinforced by more ads on buses, in trains, in newspapers and on websites. Enough! We got it. We’re beginning to hate that stupid ad, and by extension, that stupid advertising agency, their stupid client, that stupid product and the stupid brand behind it.
Two dollars off your coffee if you’ll just turn Bluetooth back on
Five years ago, Bluetooth location-based marketing showed us what can go wrong when we overestimate consumers’ need for more advertising. This, we were assured, would be different. There would be no generic untargeted campaigns — these would be short, smart campaigns, targeted by time and place, offering only relevant coupons for amazing, irresistable discounts on brands the advertiser already knows we want. We’d walk past a billboard and it would know so much about us, it could follow us home and pick out an outfit for us to wear to dinner that evening.
Not quite. Smart billboards proved so dumb that the Bluetooth features in most phones were turned off within weeks of purchase. Untargeted, dumb campaigns for movies that finished screening months ago lingered on, friendless and neglected, still trying to push unwanted ringtones and desktop wallpaper at passers-by long after the campaign had ended. Age, sex and demographic targeting wasn’t available, so the same offers got pushed to anybody who walked past. And then Bluetooth got viruses. Imagine AR viruses (trust me, distant lover, I’m clean, I swear.)
AR is more consensual than Bluetooth marketing (nothing bothers you unless you launch the AR app) but the problem with Bluetooth wasn’t just the invasive ping. Consumers would rather gather and select offers of interest to them at a time and place of their own choosing, not while they’re engaged in a task-focused activity on a busy city street. Talking to your friend, dodging other pedestrians, not getting run over by bicycle couriers and remembering how much time you have before your next appointment is quite challenging enough. Most of us would rather do our discount shopping planning from the comfy couch at home, which is why my letterbox and what remains of my weekend newspaper supplement are still stuffed full of catalogues and inserts.
Catalogues don’t need location-awareness, integration with the subway timetable or (Jebus save us) social discovery. They have tactile satisfaction, high-resolution colour printing, massive scale and penetration, they can be targeted to subscribers or by subject matter. And they’re downright indestructible. In the peace and quiet of my own home it is so much easier to survey the sales and coupons and discounts on offer, pick and choose, and plan a journey in to cherry-pick my selection. Like land-mines, I hate catalogues — I’d support any move to ban them outright, but like land-mines, they aren’t going away any time soon.
The cathedral and the bazaar both have 10% off today
As to the AR advertisers and the AR platforms themselves, will business listings from different publishers be pooled or will they be firewalled off? In other words, will McDonalds locations rub shoulders with KFC locations if the AR publisher has both brands as clients, or will the publisher maintain datasets separately for each client using the platform?
If you’re able to negotiate the former, then the benefit to consumers is multiplied by the network effect, you get greater adoption by developers and by consumers. But in an AR platform, the processing power of the phone and the consumer’s tolerance for visual clutter both limit the number of advertisers you can service in one city block. Do you give priority to advertisers closer to where the consumer is standing, or to the advertiser most likely to collect a click-through, or to the advertiser in that block who’s paying you the most?
If you’re required to maintain separate datasets and set out to build separate AR apps for each client’s brand, you may see money sooner but you’re less likely to get widespread adoption since the consumer benefit is far lower. Few consumers will be interested in installing, learning and using an app that shows them only the location of one brand’s outlets unless it’s something they use frequently (in which case, unless they’re travelling, you’d imagine they know where to find it.)
We’ve seen examples of both approaches on the iPhone so far, and I think the apps offering open, broader datasets (like Google Maps) or narrower, deeper datasets (like Urbanspoon) have the brightest future.
My advice: choose either the broad or the deep. Choose early and stick to your choice. If the market direction changes, the tailwind disappears and you get caught somewhere between the two, you may walk into something more painful than a street sign.
4 Responses to “Augmented Reality: your ad makes me want to hurl chunks”
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
Nice post. I agree with you that augmented reality platforms are going to represent a fundamental shift in the way we experience and act on advertising.
For my money the true worth of these platforms (also see http://www.layar.com which has a 3D version of a similar concept) is that they enable marketing messages to become truly interactive, in real time and space, for the first time.
This has also represents something very important from a commercial model perspective. Virtually all advertising (digital and other) is sold on some version of a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis. AR has the chance to change this paradigm, since with AR, consumers are not simply viewing ads they are truly engaging with them.
Great post, Alan. Although not central to your main theme, its worth noting that AR app jerkiness is generally not caused by lag in “re-render[ing] all those 3D objects”. Actually the iPhone is pretty damned good at rendering that type of stuff, as can be seen from the plethora of snappy 3D games. Rather this problem is due to lack of responsiveness of the built-in digital compass. I suspect it may be some time before much more accurate and highly responsive compasses make their way into iPhones – probably some years. Until then, AR will likely render all of us a bit nauseous as it struggles to re-align itself sporadically to our iPhone-clasping hand movements.
Thanks Gregan, that's good to clarify. I will await a more accurate
digital compass and hold out for my AR sunglasses, I think!
(Sorry Graham/Gregan for transposing your names earlier, now corrected.)
Great point Gregan: the opportunity is now there to interact with the ad. It's not something we've really seen since interactive TV and now the consumer has a smart phone, which is much better than a remote control with a few coloured buttons on it.
It's taken at least a decade for the marketing industry to learn how to do great work with ad banners and online video. Can we hope to see a few great campaigns in AR in, what, 2020? Or is there an equivalent of Moore's Law that applies to the marketing industry's ability to adapt to new marketing media?
…and if so, are they getting faster or slower to adapt every 18mths?