Ag Voice | Augmented Reality; its time to start fresh

Augmented Reality (AR) sounds straight out of a science book made for the nerds, but don’t fret – the experience it delivers is so immersive and natural that it easily hooks on people from all walks of life.

In today’s typical life of massive information overload, AR breaks the monotony and intelligently places your brand in the perspective of real world surroundings creating a solid Human-Brand-Interface. Any doubt and fear existing in the market is due to the absence of ingenious products and smart unobtrusive design. Great AR advertising campaigns are creative pieces of art that don’t interrupt you, instead deliver relevant (contextual) situation based content that you can’t wait to experience, enjoy and share with your friends.

AR may have been introduced to you in a way that felt too far-fetched and plenty of work to adopt and employ. True, most AR companies have approached the technology as a technologist, not as a marketer. It’s time to clear your mind and start fresh.

The Future Is Now: Take your everyday print ad - enhance with its related TVC/short video, quick links (social media, website), call-to-action (Enquiry, Buy, Share) and deals (coupon codes and discounts) – you already have your first AR ad campaign. Forget AR, call this Motion Print: add stunning, interactive, real time and virtually unlimited real estate to print by extending it onto your smartphone screens. Lead your audience from offline to online media with a hyper-immersive and hyper-targeted experience unlike anything seen before. Maintain the credibility and accessibility of traditional print & outdoor media and boost up your promotions by enhancing it with the interactivity and live information from the digital skin.

Motion Print delivers interactive digital content and call-to-action on print collateral. Surprise them with innovative ads, let them share on social media, make your brand the center of conversation, showcase your product with 3D views, boost brand recognition, update prints in real time and inspire emotion that transforms your customers into hardcore fans of your brand! Make your prints talk, play music, dance and come alive with animation.

Sounds too easy and exciting? Allow me to take you a notch ahead – hand over a gorgeous 3D model of your product, merchandise, brand ambassador to your audience and let them use these elements in creating their content. User Generated Content (UGC) is the wave of the future in content marketing. A little more than half of Internet users are content creators, while the rest are curators. You may have experienced reasonable success in creating interesting enough content for the curators to share but what about your space in the other half? We are talking about half of the Internet users worldwide, too large to ignore, a sin when we already have access to AR!

A modern human being is forced to choose between the digital world or the real world; to put the phone aside and attend to surroundings or immerse self in the phone completely oblivious of the surroundings. Augmented Reality breaks the disconnect between your digital and real life. Great AR campaigns deliver a seamless experience where the user cannot differentiate between the real world and its virtual augmentation. 160 million smart phone users in India braced by steady 3G data, are expected to grow by a staggering 225 million before the end of 2015. AR will soon be ubiquitous as the ultimate mass medium of advertising and you will be budgeting for it every year in your marketing plan. Needless to say, early adopters have every advantage to reap #getARalready!

The authors of this article are Vishal Reddy, Founder,Wowsome and Karan Bhangay, Co- Founder, Wowsome.