Why VR Isn’t Ready to Be a Marketing Platform (Yet)

Why Virtual Reality Isn’t Ready to Be a Marketing Platform (Yet) is my new post for theMIX agency, cautioning everyone excited about using Oculus Rift and other VR platforms for marketing purposes, based on years of painful experiences when Second Life was the Next Big Marketing Platform thing. Sample:

If you experience a VR version of driving a car (as Volvo is doing), does it make you any more likely to buy an actual model? That doesn’t follow at all, and compelling case studies are scant. I helped launch or wrote about dozens of virtual reality marketing campaigns in Second Life, some of them quite clever, and I can summarize the ROI for nearly all of them: Nada. Second Life users, exploring the virtual world to play games, build, socialize, or (of course) have virtual sex, would suddenly find a real world brand intruding on their fun like a kind of 3d billboard. They’d enjoy the best campaigns, like a virtual gossip game promoting the Gossip Girls TV show [above], but then just move on to consuming other Second Life content. 

Read the rest here, and have an spectacular weekend (virtual and/or otherwise)!

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[Orca Flotta]

VR isn't ready to be a marketing platform because we - the fukn users - are not ready to be victims of ad campaigns. Not many of us are interested in spending money on that Oculus thing in the first place, but when we do we wanna use it for what it's made for (getting seasick and feeling weird), not to see advertising. Same with the normal SL. We come to play and live, maybe shop for virtual goods, not to buy RL shit. Virtual and real don't mix well, they don't play nice together.

I guess most of SL's users are adult enough (I know, it's hard to believe) to know what and when and where to buy new RL goods ... and our playtime at the family PC isn't one of those times.

Maybe, just maybe it could work for soft/hardware companies, selling SL related products. Imagining Hamlet getting frustrated because his funky little Alienware craptop turned out to be the wrong tool for the job; voila, time for Asus, Acer, Razor to show him real good gaming laptops. Then, and only then, marketing in VR makes any kind of warped sense.

But why are we discussing problems of commercial entities, trying to get our money? I'll be damned giving them profiteers any hints on how to rip me off.

[cyberserenity]

I love my Oculus it makes Second life a totally new experience but as a marketing tool? Naaahh. Is a screen a maketing tool? I think there have to be other ways to do effective advertising.

[Ezra]

No one would buy a car or a house or much of anything based on just imagery, but imagery can get you to a car lot or plot to see the real deal.

Virtual drives or tours of cars, homes, whatever else that's typically witnessed in TV commercials and magazines ads are obvious areas VR can improve.

If I was thinking about spending a weekend on some bike trail on some mountain, I think a virtual ride filmed with one of the many 360 stereoscopic cameras being produced would compel me more than a pamphlet.

If that same bike trail had marketing in Second Life; it's not the same and not worth comparing. The only similarity between a 360 stereoscopic filmed experience and a recreation in Second Life is that you can call both "VR", but that's useless and missing 99% of the important details and distinctions between the two experiences.

VW recreations have their many many uses, like in-world classrooms where it doesn't matter if the class room looks exactly like its real world counterpart, but if Six Flags wants to sell tickets to a new ride, offering a demo ride within Rift is nothing to be compared to a scripted rollercoaster in a VW like Second Life.

[A.J.]

Let's briefly enjoy the creativity before it does become another intrusive marketing platform.

Money is God and Life is God's billboard.

[Iggy]

I'm skeptical about VR, but if we had the ability to cheaply look at VR content, it might help us decide. Cars are a good case. You never know what the seats feel like until you do a test drive, but to be able to look over the interior, trunk, controls, and see a car from every angle without a saleman's patter in your ear?

It's a logical extension of what I did with a browser: custom-build and price a couple of cars before going to the dealer and actually driving them.

As for Volvo's campaign? We have an S60 in the family; sleek, almost autonomous, a great value for the price. Volvo cannot, however, figure out how to market itself in the US to younger buyers: safe? fast? Euro-luxe at a lower price than Benz and BMW? All true, but their advertising is nearly as bad as Linden Lab's. They toss stuff at the wall, including VR, to see what sticks even as the pull the C30, their hot hatchback, out of the UR market.