Virtually reality (VR) has taken digital marketing by storm. VR not only opens up new marketing opportunities for brands but it also allows them to engage with customers on a more interactive level.
To stay competitive, marketers must embrace VR as a new channel to reach customers.
ReelFX, a digital studio that produces award-winning animated films, short form content and virtual reality experiences, is at the cutting edge when it comes to using VR to create immersive branded content. The company has worked with brands like American Express, GMC, and AT&T to deliver incredible interactive experiences.
We talked to Creative Director at ReelFX Kevin Althans about how digital marketers can best leverage VR, what role agencies play in this process and where he sees the marketing opportunities going.
Agencies are adding VR to their technology stacks.
Agencies are embracing new partnerships with specialized tech companies as part of an effort to expand their offerings to clients. ReelFX works with a mix of agencies and marketing companies on interactive projects, and in some instances even works directly with the brands.
According to Althans, in terms of work “it’s pretty evenly split right now between traditional agencies and marketing companies.”
“It’s creeping into the agency awareness,” he said. “Agencies are typically separate from the marketing concerns so a lot time this may fall outside their scope of work but more and more we’re finding that agencies are picking up this kind of work as part of their unified advertising strategy.”
With VR, you need to think outside the box.
VR shouldn’t be treated like any other media channel. It requires clients to think outside of the traditional marketing bubble and create new ideas that bare in mind the target audience, channel distribution, and technological parameters.
“Sometimes the clients want to shoehorn traditional advertising and other marketing concepts into a VR space but that doesn’t work,” Althans said. “You really have to think about in terms of what that medium demands for experiences or production.”
It’s also important to keep the user in mind. Althans pointed out that many of the users may not be familiar with VR, and in many cases it may be their first time using the technology.
“Whether we’re doing activations for a site like indy 500 or comicon or SXSW or distributing it via apps for VR, for a lot of consumers that go through these experience, it’s still their first time and we need to keep that in mind,” he said.
It’s all about impressions.
For VR, there are still several barriers to mass adoption that must be addressed — cost being the most prohibitive.
Althans said that this shouldn’t be a deterrent, however, because although there’s little market penetration compared to other media channels, clients can still explode on the scene by creating an incredibly novel experience.
This is largely because with VR it’s not just about the experience itself. It’s also about the hype and virality of the activation. While the safe bet is to go with more distributed platform, like Google Cardboard or YouTube 360, Althans said that for the major activations, it’s all about the impressions. This means that the real marketing opportunity for VR is in the reach of the campaign.
“It’s all about impressions.. when you’re talking about an activation at a major event like the U.S. Open or the Super Bowl, the number of impressions and word of mouth are almost like a geometric quality to it,” he said.
When you’re creating a VR marketing campaign it’s incredibly important to have a social media component. Althans highlighted how the social activation feeds into the campaign as it enables users to share their experiences. “That’s where the numbers really balloon and the ROI for impressions starts paying dividends,” he said.
Prepare for the VR Land Grab.
VR still hasn’t reached the mass, however, Althans suggests that once it becomes normalized, it will change the way we consume media and content.
For marketers, by the time VR hits mainstream masses, they are already late to the party. “It’s just going to be a land grab for marketers and advertisers trying to get their brands and messages on to that platform,” Althans said.